THEATRE PREVIEW:

“LATER LIFE” at the Old Globe Theatre

Published in San Diego Union-Tribune September, 1994

The director's notes for "Later Life" (opening tomorrow at the Old Globe Theatre) compare playwright A.R. Gurney to Anton Chekhov.

In a recent phone conversation from New York, Gurney chuckled at the comparison. "I'm complimented," he said of the connection made by director Nicholas Martin. "I've always liked Chekhov. We both seem to be obsessed with dying cultures and obsolete values trying to survive."

Chekhov's "dying culture" was late nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy. Gurney chronicles the demise of America's aristocracy -- the well-bred East Coast WASP.

In his twentieth play, and the sixth to be produced at the Old Globe, Gurney once again sets a small story against a broad backdrop. A middle-aged couple meets on the terrace of a high-rise overlooking Boston Harbor: Austin, a kind, civilized, uptight, divorced Boston Brahmin banker, and Ruth, a Midwestern romantic, a spirited, four-times-married-now-separated abused housewife from Las Vegas.

They reminisce about an opportunity missed, when, thirty years ago, they met on the island of Capri. As they dance around each other, deciding how and whether to reconnect, a stream of hilariously intrusive guests (played by just two actors) drifts in and out, flotsam and jetsam from the bubbly party inside. "Later Life" is a rueful comedy about second chances.

"The play is not just about the later life of people in general, or of this couple; the choices we make and don't make," Gurney explains. "It's also about the later life of the country. The decay and obsolescence of the original values established on the shores of New England...

"The apartment's view is exaggerated, metaphorical. It looks north to Salem, home of Hawthorne and the beginnings of American Puritan mercantile culture. And it looks out on Provincetown, the image of freedom, tourism and sexual ambiguity... Those other characters show the de-regionalization of America. The South coming North, the North coming South, the East moving West... Hopefully, the play suggests, through those other characters, that people can change, can put on any number of costumes, live any number of ways. But Austin and Ruth are stuck in one role."

Gurney, now 64, is cryptic, noncommittal, about the events in his own life that may have motivated or informed this play, which had a successful off-Broadway run in 1993. "All of us have -- or haven't -- taken those turns we recognize in later life were significant." He will say no more, except that his inspiration was "literary as well as personal." The play was inspired by a Henry James short story, "The Beast in the Jungle," which Gurney had taught many times in his 25 years at M.I.T.

Now he splits his time between a home in Connecticut and an apartment in New York, where he is currently overseeing his latest venture, "A Cheever Evening," opening soon at Playwrights Horizons. A complicated mosaic of 18 stories by John Cheever, it's "an attempt to take a significant American writer and show how stageworthy he is."

In the spring, the Manhattan Theatre Club will stage his newest play, "Sylvia," which he describes a "a domestic comedy with a twist, a domestic triangle but one of its points is a dog... I'm continuing to experiment with the theater form and its possibilities." He's been working on TV and movie projects, but thus far, "without much success."

Meanwhile, "Later Life" has taken on a life of its own. It is getting good regional theater exposure (the Globe beat out South Coast Repertory Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum for the West coast premiere; South Coast Rep's production opens September 20), and it's a hit in Berlin, where, the playwright says, "it looks more like Beckett than Gurney. It's very abstract, and we Americans are ultimately realists."

The award-winning playwright-realist plans to come West to see the San Diego and Orange County productions of "Later Life," which Clive Barnes of the New York Post called "charmingly clever yet immeasurably touching."

DATEBOOK

"LATER LIFE"

The West coast premiere of the A.R. Gurney comedy opens tomorrow (September 16). Prologue seminar ($2.5-5.00) Monday, September 19, 7 p.m. Performances Tuesday-Sunday 8 p.m. Saturday 2 p.m. (October 1 and 8 only), Sundays 2 p.m. Through October 30. Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park. $19-34; 239-2255.

PAT LAUNER is a freelance writer and the theater critic for KPBS-FM.

©1994 Patté Productions Inc.