A. R. Gurney, Jr. passed most of his career happily and successfully as an exponent of witty, WASPy dramatic amusements, a latter-day Philip Barry, if somewhat less swellegant. Three titles give you the general layout of the territory: The Dining Room (1982), The Perfect Party (1986), The Cocktail Hour (1988). In the last decade, he’s been undergoing a kind of mid-career crisis, which is showing alarming signs of deteriorating into an end-career crisis. It began with Sylvia, whose dramatis personae were the usual moneyed sophisticates but now joined by a dog—a dog played by Sarah Jessica Parker, whose big moment was a duet with her owner on “Night and Day.” Hard to object to that. Many straight plays would be improved by the addition of a dog singing Cole Porter.
But then came last year’s The Fourth Wall, in which Gurney’s frustration at the right-wing degeneration of George W. Bush’s America was embodied in a symbolic rupture of the genteel constraints of the Gurneyan play. Bush was such an affront to the health of the Republic that Gurney’s heroine could only confront the danger by busting through the naturalistic conventions of dinner-party drama and the conventional middle-class life it embodies.
Gurney’s play was certainly brilliantly symbolic, though perhaps not of what he intended. In years to come, it will serve as a very literal illustration of the way much of the liberal northeastern mindset has become unhinged by this President. Readers will have their
