Elegy for the Declining Wasp

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE MIDDLE AGES by A.R. Gurney Jr.

Three decades pass. Somewhere just offstage, things are happening: the personal pageantry of weddings, christenings, funerals; social upheavals ranging from suburbanization to the sexual revolution. But only the echoes of change are heard in the trophy room of a venerable men's club, the sole setting of The Middle Ages. In a time of ethnicity, the club remains a haven for an embattled Wasp old guard. For the younger generation that departs on a picaresque journey through the chaotic world outside, the club is a beacon, a symbol of the formative power of tradition even on those who would escape its sway.

The Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father ("My mother got so bored she died") and the girl's divorced, social-climbing mother. The play is also a moving struggle for control and forgiveness between the autocratic father and his farcically self-destructive son.

The central character is the rebellious, goofy boy who becomes a college dropout, an AWOL sailor, a protesting scholar and a waiflike pornographer. He could be a mere shnook. But as shrewdly played by Jack Gilpin, he is a natural winner with a compulsion to foul up to prove his independence. Ann McDonough, in the unshowy part of the girl, is compelling in the play's best moment: having married Gilpin's conventional younger brother, she sees Gilpin come through the window in his sailor's uniform to woo her away. She is all but ready to go when she learns that the shore patrol is downstairs and realizes that Gilpin has bragged about this escapade to everyone he knows. Once again, the knight-errant has undertaken his quest not in chivalry but in folly.

As the boy's father, Andre Gregory, veteran avant-garde director and recent film star (My Dinner with Andre), gives a mannered and actorish performance that somehow works perfectly: he has exactly the fussy, studied quality of a paterfamilias of a bygone era.

Like the historical Middle Ages, the present era strikes Gurney as a time to conserve a dwindling heritage. His central character admires the medieval period as "a quiet, dull life punctuated by ceremony " That describes precisely the ordered, ancestor-worshiping existence of the families in The Middle Ages and, more broadly, of virtually all families. By the play's end, Gurney's rebel reconciles himself--and the audience--to the serene rewards of dull domesticity.

Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. grew up in Buffalo in a world bounded by "the Saturn Club, the Nichols School, Friday-night dancing class, run by an immortal martinet of a man who had also taught my parents and my grandmother, and Trinity Episcopal Church, where my family had sat in the same pew for a hundred years--except on winter Sundays when the snow was good for skiing." From childhood, recalls Gurney, 52, "I was the guy who rebelled, not in action, but by what I said at the dinner table. I had a constant quarrel with that world, its prejudice, stuffiness and closedness. Yet I found it congenial; it gave a comforting sense of continuity, and the club food was good."

An avid player of charades and spinner of tales, young "Peter" (as he was called by everyone in the family for reasons even he has forgotten) turned instinctively to using home life as the basis for satire. At prep school, he won a prize for a story about his family, called Buffalo Meat. After graduating from Williams College and touring South America and Asia in "a stint as a wild man in the Navy," Gurney went to the Yale School of Drama. "My whole family came there in trepidation to see my play Love in Buffalo, and left in relief that the revelations were not worse. But after that, whenever something of mine was staged, they pretty much stayed away."

One of the funniest scenes in Gurney's The Dining Room depicts a pathetically senile matriarch who interrupts Thanksgiving dinner at her own table to announce that it is time for her to get up and go home. Says Gurney's uncle, Buffalo Physician Ramsdell Gurney: "My mother did exactly what Peter had her do in that play. To see her portrayed that way saddened me, but the audience thought it was terribly amusing." The most striking parallel in Gurney's plays to his life is the marriage between the young lovers' parents in The Middle Ages: four years ago, Gurney's widowed mother married Gurney's wife's widowed father. Says Gurney: "This time, though, it was life imitating art -- I wrote the play first."

Gurney's own marriage has lasted half his life and has produced four children (the two youngest are in college). He has taught literature for 23 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last year, gambling on the success of The Dining Room, he took a sabbatical and moved to Manhattan to be closer to theater life. This year he stayed on leave, put his Massachusetts home up for sale, and bought an Upper West Side apartment. Next year he will commute to M.I.T. Says he: "I have discovered that I need to be here during the rehearsal process. Plays are like ships that are hit suddenly by squalls from the strangest directions."

A sometime novelist (Entertaining Strangers, The Gospel According to Joe) and television scriptwriter (an adaptation for PBS of the John Cheever story O Youth and Beauty!), Gurney is writing a play that he hopes will take on bigger and more tragic proportions than his 16 slight, mostly short stage works to date. Says he: "When I start writing a script, it always seems serious. But some how the pratfalls sneak in, and then I fight to keep them." His upbringing, he believes, has provided more than simply the raw material of his scripts: "I think it was the very fact that these tight rules were imposed that made me turn to drama, where the rules are also tight. I learned early to dance in chains." -- By William A. Henry III This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.