Bøger af A. R. Gurney

This collection includes two one-act plays: DARLENE and THE GUEST LECTURER. In DARLENE a mysterious woman puts a strain on a suburban couple's marriage. In THE GUEST LECTURER, Mona runs a financially strapped regional theatre and is willing to take "diabolical steps" to keep the venue going. "Wild. Weird. Wacky. And rather wonderful. That's DARLENE & THE GUEST LECTURER. A R Gurney's new pair of one-acters. For the past fifteen years, Gurney has been a strong presence in the American theater. He's incisively exposed the feeling lurking beneath the stolid WASP exterior in such plays as THE DINING ROOM and THE COCKTAIL HOUR. He's shown he can write tenderly, too, in LOVE LETTERS, which details a friendship from childhood to death. He also demonstrated that he could be Neil Simon-funny in SYLVIA, in which a dog comes between a man and wife. Here, though, Gurney has gone out on a comic and dramatic limb--but one from which an adventurous theatergoer can enjoy the view. DARLENE takes place in the suburban home of Angela and Jim, who are mulling over a letter that was stuck under their car's windshield wiper. Jim is shocked by the explicit language and sexual innuendo, but Angela is titillated. She eventually admits that she wishes the letter had come from him. The extent of Jim's horniness, though, can be found in his horn-rimmed glasses. The play is a more civilized WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, mixed with a dash of Pinter's THE LOVER in which a husband and wife can only have sex if they pretend they're other people. But this view of two-empty-nesters who must admit to an empty marriage is as poignant as it is atypical. THE GUEST LECTURER, though, is where Gurney really lets his imagination soar. A regional theater that once had the resources to pay two dozen actors in YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU now finds that even the two-character THE GIN GAME is beyond its means. So it goes back to the bare bones that theater once was: a singular speaker, Hartley, who will lecture on drama. ...a nifty Twilight Zone-like subplot." Peter Filichia, The Star-Ledger

"... this poignant new play is a welcome reminder of A R Gurney's gliding dialogue and structural elegance, as well as the troubled, rueful heart that informs all his work." Ben Brantley, The New York Times "A play that does everything right. The new drama by A R Gurney looks at who Americans were in the mid-1950s-a few Americans, anyway-and how they behaved out in those vast stretches of the world over which they had sway, and what their songs and movies and slang expressions and values were. The story centers on four U S Navy people (one a Navy wife) stationed at a base in Japan in 1954 and 1955...This subtle, tender play is, I think, Gurney's best work. It's John Cheever-meets-James Michener and it's a critical elegy for a long-vanished American view of life." Donald Lyons, New York Post "It is no coincidence that the movie playing at the overseas Officer's Club in A R Gurney's new play FAR EAST, is From Here to Eternity: the 1953 Pearl Harbor drama starring Burt Lancaster as a rugged Army sergeant who has a torrid affair with the restless wife of his commander ... [A] deliciously wry play ..." Amy Gamerman, The Wall Street Journal

A LIGHT LUNCH is a post-Bush cautionary tale about the price paid for legacy. When a young lawyer from Texas invites a literary agent for lunch in a New York City restaurant, more than a production is on the table. "The gentlemanly playwright A R Gurney casually tosses his own metaphorical shoe ... in the direction of our departing president in his latest politically minded play, A LIGHT LUNCH. Mr Gurney take[s] jovial, self-deprecating jabs at his own foibles, and the follies of the theater business too." -Charles Isherwood, New York Times "A R Gurney's jokey new play, A LIGHT LUNCH, is refreshingly unlike most contempo American political theater. Plenty of laughs, and no shortage of fun moments between the performers. It's a "Lunch" worth chewing over!" -Variety "Gurney has fun mocking theatrical conventions ..." -Backstage "A R Gurney's tasty new play ... A LIGHT LUNCH, his latest work about our soon-to-be ex-President, is a model of political theater. The beauty of it is that its politics and its theater could not be more inextricably bound. Exquisitely self-aware, A LIGHT LUNCH uses the theater - and self-deprecating comments about A R Gurney himself - to make serio-comic points about George Bush throughout the play ... The emphasis of the production ... is on the text of Gurney's play, which is where the focus rightly belongs." -Barbara & Scott Siegel, TheaterMania.com

In an attempt to account for the family inheritance, the scion of a wealthy Buffalo, New York clan and her willful, college-aged son visit their long-lost cousin Mary. The catch: Mary is living in an asylum for the wealthy insane and has barely spoken in years, forcing mother and son to employ radical ends to get through. "Comparisons between playwrights and novelists are almost always misleading, but I'd say it's more or less accurate to think of A R Gurney as the John P Marquand of American drama. Like Marquand, Mr Gurney writes about WASPs and their discontents, and his ruefully funny studies of a ruling class in decline are too often dismissed as trivial by critics who take no interest in the inner lives of the insufficiently underprivileged. Also, like Marquand, he is prolific to a fault, and his work is as unevenly inspired as it is unfailingly professional. I've reviewed several of his plays in this space, always with pleasure - I like his best work very much - but rarely with outright enthusiasm. Thus, I'm glad to report that CRAZY MARY, Mr Gurney's new portrait of life among the white-bread set, is a highly impressive piece of work, a serious comedy that succeeds in wringing honest laughs out of an awkward subject. The Mary in question is a middle-aged manic depressive who has spent the past three decades stashed away in a high-priced sanitarium to which her late father consigned her after she made the fatal mistake of sleeping with the gardener. in addition to being crazy, Mary is loaded - she inherited all her father's money - and when Lydia, Mary's second cousin once removed, becomes her legal guardian after a death in the family ... well, you figure it out, if you can. Every twist in the plot of CRAZY MARY took me by surprise, and none of them disappointed me in the slightest. What impressed me the most about CRAZY MARY is that Mr Gurney walks with unerring skill along the knife edge that separates comedy from pathos. In truth, there is nothing remotely funny about Mary's situation, much less her condition, and we laugh at her plight precisely because it is so pitiful. Nor does Mr Gurney let any of his characters off the hook, least of all Lydia, who has spent her own life walking on tiptoe through a world of tight-lipped propriety in which the most important things are left unsaid ..." Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal "... Aside from the tireless (and seemingly immortal) Horton Foote, no eminent American playwright of the last few decades rivals the staying power and productivity of Mr Gurney. Though he would seem to be limited by sticking to one area of expertise - the malaise and mores of the endangered East Coast WASP - Mr Gurney's theatrical output is surprisingly varied. If his essential subject has largely remained the same, he keeps shifting his focus and perspective in admirably venturesome ways, most recently with his fiercely partisan, Bush-baiting political comedies ... As a story of ethnic dinosaurs stranded by history, CRAZY MARY brings to mind vintage Gurney works like THE COCKTAIL HOUR and THE MIDDLE AGES ... His earlier plays had the passive wistfulness of Henry James portraits of unlived lives; CRAZY MARY has the active morality of E M Forster novels, demanding that its characters get off their isolated duffs and connect with the world beyond. The spirit in CRAZY MARY is honorably willing ..." -Ben Brantley, The New York Times

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMAIn such critically acclaimed plays as The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour, A. R. Gurney has wittily captured the manners of upper-middle-class WASP America, but never as gracefully or with such dazzling economy as in Love Letters. Tracing the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner, the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written-and what is left unsaid-in their letters. A smash hit both off and on Broadway, Love Letters captures Andy and Melissa with a precision of detail and depth of feeling that only Gurney can command. Two other, thematically related plays by Gurney, The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer, are included, providing a trio of wry and affectionate paeans to love lost, found, and fleetingly glimpsed.

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories selected.On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "e;Nobody can read like a writer,"e; Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.