A.R. Gurney's plays a staple in SW Florida

The plays of A.R. Gurney, who died last week at 86, have been theater bedrock in Southwest Florida. Every community theater here except one has staged “Sylvia,” the tale of a stray canine who becomes the bone of contention between spouses whose careers are on opposite trajectories.

The Pulitzer Prize nominee, whose plays portrayed the fading culture of the Eastern WASP aristocracy and made him one of the most widely produced dramatists of his generation, died June 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

His literary agent, Jonathan Lomma, confirmed the death. The cause was not known.

“Love Letters,” the two-actor play of childhood correspondents whose lives become fragilely entwined, is one of Gurney’s most widely known, having played Broadway with several famous couples.

It came to the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall in Fort Myers in 2016 with the star power of Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. An independent production brought it to Sugden Theatre in Naples, and The Marco Players, after a successful run, took it on the road for several private appearances. Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Myers offered it in 2006.

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The Marco Players also staged two other Gurney plays, “The Golden Age” and “The Fourth Wall.”

Naples Players produced two other Gurney plays, as well, “Black Tie” (2012) and “Later Life” (2011). The Center for Performing Arts Bonita Springs weighed in with “Later Life” with an April production this year.

Nor is there an end in sight: Studio Players is staging “The Cocktail Hour” July 21 to Aug. 6, and Florida Repertory Theater’s professional company will reprise “Sylvia” Oct. 24-Nov. 15; it premiered his “Indian Blood” for Southwest Florida in 2008.

“We've never done Gurney. I wanted to do 'The Cocktail Hour' because it's more of a personal journey for him,” said Scott Lilly, artistic director of The Studio Players, about staging its first Gurney play. He said he considered Gurney one of the "classic playwrights" the company wanted to have in its repertoire. 

He said the play weaves in “the closeness of family, commitment and responsibility," but it tucks in a lot of humor, too. 

 "I was literally laughing out loud when I  was reading it. People think ‘ “The Cocktail Hour” — that's going to be a little dry.’ But there's so much opportunity in it to have fun."

Gurney worked for years as a teacher before he found major success in the theater in the 1980s with "The Dining Room," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Like many of his plays, it examined the furnishings, customs and emotional fragility of upper-middle-class society in vignettes spanning several decades. The play established Gurney as a major playwright and brought comparisons to the fiction of John Cheever — whose works Gurney later adapted for the stage.

In the play, a college student brings a camera into the dining room of his aging aunt Harriet, who is pleased to display her crystal and cutlery. Then he explains the anthropological purpose of his visit: "Well, you see, we're studying the eating habits of various vanishing cultures. For example, someone is talking about the Kikuyus of northern Kenya. And my roommate is doing the Cree Indians of Saskatchewan. And my professor suggested I do a slide show on us."

"Us?" Harriet says.

"The WASPs," the nephew replies. "Of the northeastern United States."

It was a culture Gurney knew well, as a scion of privilege and tradition in Buffalo, where he, his parents and seven of his eight great-grandparents were born.

"Most of my plays are very close to home," he told Playbill in 2010. "That was very much my family on stage."

At a time when many of the characters of other playwrights were cursing and throwing things around the stage, Gurney found a niche as the decorous adult of the theater, with his intelligent, provocative, bitterly humorous plays.

"As a chronicler of contemporary America's most unfashionable social stratum — upper-middle-class WASPs," New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote in his review of "The Dining Room," "this playwright has no current theatrical peer."

Gurney became one of the most prolific dramatists of his time, with more than 50 plays to his credit. He sometimes had two plays in production and a third in the works.

With "The Cocktail Hour," first produced in 1989, Gurney wrote perhaps his most personal play, about an aspiring playwright, John, who returns home to tell his skeptical parents, Bradley and Ann, that he has written a play called "The Cocktail Hour."

Bradley: That's a terrible title . . . To begin with, it's been used.

John: That's 'The Cocktail PARTY,' Pop. That's T.S. Eliot.

Bradley: Even worse. We walked out on that one.

Ann: This is 'The Cocktail Hour,'' darling . . . You invite people to a cocktail party. A cocktail hour is family. It's private. It's personal. It's very different.

Bradley: Nobody will know that. It will confuse everyone. They'll come expecting T.S. Eliot, and they'll get John. Either way, they'll want their money back.

In 1989, Gurney premiered perhaps his most widely produced work, "Love Letters," a two-person play that debuted on Broadway with Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards. It focuses on an aging man and woman who read letters written over a period of 50 years, revealing their hopes, regrets and deepest emotional scars.

"Love Letters" received glowing reviews, was a Pulitzer finalist and has been produced on television three times. It has been performed by stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, James Earl Jones, Laura Linney, Julie Harris and William Hurt.

"WASPs do have a culture — traditions, idiosyncrasies, quirks, particular signals and totems we pass on to one another," Gurney told The Washington Post in 1982. "But the WASP culture, or at least that aspect of the culture I talk about, is enough in the past so that we can now look at it with some objectivity, smile at it, and even appreciate some of its values. There was a closeness of family, a commitment to duty, to stoic responsibility, which I think we have to say, weren't entirely bad."

Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. was born Nov. 1, 1930, in Buffalo. His father owned a real estate and insurance business.

Gurney, who was known as Pete throughout his life, wrote his first play in kindergarten and made it clear that he had no interest in joining his father's business. He attended the private St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1952. (He was two years behind another major figure of the stage, Stephen Sondheim.)

After serving in the Navy, Gurney went to the Yale School of Drama, receiving a master's degree in 1958. He taught at a private school before joining the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught literature, drama and the humanities for more than 25 years.

In the meantime, he wrote plays in the summers and had little success at first. He had a minor breakthrough in 1971 with "Scenes From American Life."

He did not write "The Cocktail Hour" until after his father's death in 1977.

"He didn't like at all what I wrote," Gurney said in 2007. "He felt I was betraying, revealing things I shouldn't reveal, embarrassing the family and using language which he thought was vulgar and unattractive."

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, the former Molly Goodyear of New York and Roxbury, Connecticut; four children; a brother; a sister; and eight grandchildren.

Gurney also published three novels and continued writing plays until the end.

"He handed in a play last week," his agent, Lomma, said in an interview. "Its title is 'Final Follies.' "

Although seemingly about a small stratum of U.S. society, Gurney's plays have proved popular around the world, in cultures far removed from the old Eastern elite.

"I've been occasionally nailed by the critics for limiting my sights to a small entity," Gurney told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, "but I've always believed that if you're accurate and true to what you're writing about, the play will have a larger human dimension. People are people."

The Washington Post contributed to this report.