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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 14, 2017

A.R. Gurney, R.I.P.

June 14, 2017 by Terry Teachout

A.R. Gurney, universally known in the theater world as “Pete,” was that rarity of rarities, a WASP of country-club-Republican lineage who wrote witty, thoughtful plays, most of them about the fast-vanishing world of upper-middle-class privilege into which he was born eighty-six years ago. In 2003 I called him “the John P. Marquand of American theater,” which still seems to me wholly apt. Like all prolific artists, Marquand very much included, Gurney was uneven, but his best plays are eloquent and intensely elegiac portraits of a world that is on the edge of extinction, and at least one of them, The Dining Room, is by way of being a masterpiece.

As I wrote in my review of Mark Lamos’s Westport Country Playhouse 2013 revival of The Dining Room:

“The Dining Room” is a piece of virtuoso stagecraft, an extended one-act play in which six actors portray 57 characters, nearly all of whom are WASPs who live or have lived in the same old-fashioned house at various times between the 30’s and 70’s. We see them in youth and old age, joy and despair, assurance and confusion, but though they are almost always shown to us with a smile, we are never allowed to doubt that time has passed them by—and that it should have done so. It is that iron conviction which charges Mr. Gurney’s witty vignettes with the bite that keeps “The Dining Room” from dissolving into soft-centered charm.

The insularity of the community in which his characters live is nicely caught in this brief exchange: “I grew up here.” “Who didn’t?” But the play’s most telling lines are spoken by an outsider, a furniture repairman who inspects the underside of the now-rickety 1898 dining table that is the play’s visual centerpiece and describes it as follows: “It’s well made. It’s a solid, serviceable copy. Based on the English.” If you’re not listening closely, you might fail to notice that those lines have the chiseled ring of an epitaph…

Gurney never had any luck on Broadway, but his plays have long been off-Broadway and regional-theater staples, and I have no doubt that they will continue to be widely performed. While our paths never crossed, I had the good fortune to cover most of his New York premieres in the later years of his long life. I described him on one of the last of those occasions as “an American master, one of the best playwrights that we have.” I mourn his passing with all my heart.

* * *

A.R. Gurney’s New York Times obituary is here.

Gurney talks about writing The Wayside Motor Inn in 1978:

P.P.C.

June 14, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T and I are taking the next three days off. We’ll be hopping in the family car at midday and driving to an undisclosed location not far from the water’s edge. My Wall Street Journal assignments for the week are finished and there’s nothing I absolutely have to get done between now and the beginning of next week, so that’s my plan: to do as little as possible.

I’ve already uploaded my regular blog postings for the rest of the week, but if you should catch me on Twitter or Facebook, please be so kind as to remind me that I shouldn’t be there.

I’ll be back in business on Monday, when I plan to celebrate an important personal anniversary in this space. Till then…see you around.

See me, hear me (cont’d)

June 14, 2017 by Terry Teachout

It’s time once again for my annual appearance on Theater Talk, the weekly TV series hosted by Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel in which theatrical types talk about…theater. This week I’m part of a panel of drama critics discussing the spring season on Broadway. Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Linda Winer, and I hold forth on the latest hit shows with great good humor, considerable disagreement, and a fair amount of acerbity (none of it mutual).

If you live in the New York area, our episode will air on WNET at 1:30 a.m. on Friday (or, to be exact, Saturday morning) and 11:30 a.m. on Sunday. As always, it will also be televised on other channels, and you’ll be able to view the episode on line next month by going here.

For more information on air dates and times, go here.

One more thing: we had so much fun that further excerpts from our conversation will be telecast next week as well! Watch this space for details.

Snapshot: Glenn Gould makes his American TV debut

June 14, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAGlenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Philharmonic perform the first movement of Bach’s D Minor Keyboard Concerto, preceded by a talk by Bernstein about the piece and interpretation. This performance, Gould’s U.S. television debut, was originally broadcast by CBS on January 31, 1960, as part of “The Creative Performer,” an episode of Ford Presents:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Randall Jarrell on good and great poets

June 14, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”

Randall Jarrell, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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