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The actors change roles, personalities and ages with virtuoso skill as they portray a wide variety of characters, from little boys to stern grandfathers, and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids. Each vignette introduces a new set of people and events: a father lectures his son on grammar and politics; a boy returns from boarding school to discover his mother's infidelity; a senile grandmother doesn't recognize her own sons at Christmas dinner; a daughter, her marriage a shambles, pleads futilely to return home. 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A R Gurney's new pair of one-acters. For the past fifteen years, Gurney has been a strong presence in the American theater. He's incisively exposed the feeling lurking beneath the stolid WASP exterior in such plays as THE DINING ROOM and THE COCKTAIL HOUR. He's shown he can write tenderly, too, in LOVE LETTERS, which details a friendship from childhood to death. He also demonstrated that he could be Neil Simon-funny in SYLVIA, in which a dog comes between a man and wife.\u003cbr\u003e Here, though, Gurney has gone out on a comic and dramatic limb--but one from which an adventurous theatergoer can enjoy the view. DARLENE takes place in the suburban home of Angela and Jim, who are mulling over a letter that was stuck under their car's windshield wiper. Jim is shocked by the explicit language and sexual innuendo, but Angela is titillated. She eventually admits that she wishes the letter had come from him. 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Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for this land the British so recently wrested from the Turks? After passing a series of tests, Holmes and Russell learn their guides are engaged in a mission for His Majesty's Government, and disguise themselves as Bedouins--Russell as the beardless youth Amir--to join them in a stealthy reconnaissance through the dusty countryside. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA recent rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. His singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous inns, cliff-hung monasteries--and into mortal danger. 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Alice, a lowly lecturer in drama at a faith-based state university in the Midwest, and Dexter, an enthusiastic student more interested in his teacher than the theatre, become embroiled in the discovery of a play by an obscure late 20th century playwright named A R Gurney. When the authorities destroy the script, these two must piece together the play and with it the future of the world gone mad. A R Gurney has written a play that, as accurately appraised by one admirer, has 'turned the world upside down.' It can be said without exaggeration that this epochal work is directly responsible for, among other things, an effective universal health care system, world peace, smooth-running public transportation and significant declines in global warming and the divorce rate. Would that Mr Gurney were alive to witness the effects of his miracle drama. Sadly, he was killed - some say murdered (possibly by, ssshhh, ) Dick Cheney - before it was ever produced. POST MORTEM, the panacea of a play described above, is not to be confused with the bubbly grievance list of a comedy with the same title ... about a panacea of a play called POST MORTEM ...  which] was also written by Mr Gurney, who at last report was very much alive. Indeed, Mr Gurney - the theatrical sociologist who has devoted much of his career to recording the habits of the endangered American WASP in plays like THE COCKTAIL HOUR and the magazine article THE DINNER PARTY - could be said to be more than alive. For the purposes of his latest offering, set 'sometime in the future' at a Midwestern university ruled by censorship, he has become God, restructuring the world in his own image to consider the plight of his beloved country and the state of his beloved art. Though he is principally known as a practitioner of the 'middle-class comedy of manners' (to borrow a dismissive self-description from this latest play), in recent years he has used the stage of the Flea for cathartic venting about a world that seems determined to destroy itself. His previous collaborations with Mr Simpson include O JERUSALEM, MRS FARNSWORTH and SCREENPLAY, all political fantasies of wish - and fear - fulfillment ... But in addition to taking sardonic aim at Mr Gurney's usual favorite targets - chiefly, the sins of the Bush administration - this latest work deals specifically and wistfully with the role of drama in a culture that has increasingly little respect for it. On one level, POST MORTEM isn't much more than a grab bag of Broadway insider jokes, polemical satire and cosmic lamentation. But its parental concern and love for theater lends the show an affecting sweetness that lingers ... it's hard not to be infected by the relish with which Mr Gurney rewrites his own past, as well as invents a glorious posterity for himself. Early in the play Dexter talks about coming upon a rare copy of Mr Gurney's privately printed autobiography, which reveals that he had affairs with many famous actresses, including Cameron Diaz and both Audrey and Catherine Hepburn. 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Comparisons between playwrights and novelists are almost always misleading, but I'd say it's more or less accurate to think of A R Gurney as the John P Marquand of American drama. Like Marquand, Mr Gurney writes about WASPs and their discontents, and his ruefully funny studies of a ruling class in decline are too often dismissed as trivial by critics who take no interest in the inner lives of the insufficiently underprivileged. Also, like Marquand, he is prolific to a fault, and his work is as unevenly inspired as it is unfailingly professional. I've reviewed several of his plays in this space, always with pleasure - I like his best work very much - but rarely with outright enthusiasm. Thus, I'm glad to report that CRAZY MARY, Mr Gurney's new portrait of life among the white-bread set, is a highly impressive piece of work, a serious comedy that succeeds in wringing honest laughs out of an awkward subject. The Mary in question is a middle-aged manic depressive who has spent the past three decades stashed away in a high-priced sanitarium to which her late father consigned her after she made the fatal mistake of sleeping with the gardener. in addition to being crazy, Mary is loaded - she inherited all her father's money - and when Lydia, Mary's second cousin once removed, becomes her legal guardian after a death in the family ... well, you figure it out, if you can. Every twist in the plot of CRAZY MARY took me by surprise, and none of them disappointed me in the slightest. What impressed me the most about CRAZY MARY is that Mr Gurney walks with unerring skill along the knife edge that separates comedy from pathos. In truth, there is nothing remotely funny about Mary's situation, much less her condition, and we laugh at her plight precisely because it is so pitiful. Nor does Mr Gurney let any of his characters off the hook, least of all Lydia, who has spent her own life walking on tiptoe through a world of tight-lipped propriety in which the most important things are left unsaid ... Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal ... Aside from the tireless (and seemingly immortal) Horton Foote, no eminent American playwright of the last few decades rivals the staying power and productivity of Mr Gurney. Though he would seem to be limited by sticking to one area of expertise - the malaise and mores of the endangered East Coast WASP - Mr Gurney's theatrical output is surprisingly varied. If his essential subject has largely remained the same, he keeps shifting his focus and perspective in admirably venturesome ways, most recently with his fiercely partisan, Bush-baiting political comedies ... As a story of ethnic dinosaurs stranded by history, CRAZY MARY brings to mind vintage Gurney works like THE COCKTAIL HOUR and THE MIDDLE AGES ... His earlier plays had the passive wistfulness of Henry James portraits of unlived lives; CRAZY MARY has the active morality of E M Forster novels, demanding that its characters get off their isolated duffs and connect with the world beyond. 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Now he's adapted that book into HUMAN EVENTS.a witty and entertaining comedy of manners.\u003cbr\u003e Porter Platt is an associate professor at an esteemed Boston college. He meets Englishman Christopher Simpson, and is impressed by his Eton and Oxford education. Simpson wants a job at the school, and Platt does yeoman work to get him one. Soon, Simpson is rising in the department, while Platt is not. Simpson also takes a shine to Platt's wife, who's attracted to him as well.\u003cbr\u003e .HUMAN EVENTS shows that Gurney is still one of America's most entertaining playwrights.\u003cbr\u003e Peter Filichia, The Star-Ledger\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e  The play] poses questions about trust--among friends, among colleagues, between spouses. 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An expert demonstration of such tactics is on ... in Mr Gurney's disarming new play, MRS FARNSWORTH ... Though it deals with revelations that are the stuff of smear campaigns, MRS FARNSWORTH is as polite and sweetly subversive a political attack as you're likely ever to come across. ...Mr Gurney's latest offering feels as if it's spoken out of the side of the mouth, sotto voce through a firmly locked jaw. Well, jaws would be locked, as this is Gurney country, land of the endangered species called WASP ... fine specimens of this breed: wealthy, inhibited folk who wear their sense of entitlement with sheepishness and smugness. They're people you might run across at a Bush fund-raiser. Mr Bush, however, would be woefully mistaken to perceive them as allies ... MRS FARNSWORTH is set in a creative-writing class in Manhattan, run by a sardonic, harried teacher named Gordon. Class is under way when a resplendently well-groomed student makes a late and incongruous entrance, like a rara avis in an urban pigeon coop. That's the pastel-clad Marjorie Farnsworth, fresh from the Connecticut suburbs and fluttering with apologies. It seems she wants to learn to write because she has a story that urgently needs to be told. It's the tale of a Vassar girl who becomes pregnant by a hard-partying Yale boy, who then pays her (by proxy) to have an abortion. Mrs Farnsworth's narrative starts to sound like a memoir in which only the names have been changed. Could be the boy in question be the young George W Bush? The left-leaning Gordon is atremble with excitement. Despite surface evidence, Mrs Farnsworth is a registered Democrat, deeply concerned about the state of the nation and keen on making her tale public. There is, however, one serious problem, she says: her disapproving husband. Enter Mr Farnsworth, with the contained apprehension and curiosity of a Victorian explorer in darkest Africa. It wouldn't be cricket, as the Farnsworths might put it, to divulge more. Though MRS FARNSWORTH is essentially a debate play, there is nothing dry about it and little that's predictable. This despite Mr and Mrs Farnsworth's being utterly true to their high WASP form, with all the expected geographical references (Fisher's Island, Greenwich) and locutions ('Pardon my French'). As one of Mr Gurney's playwriting antecedents, Philip Barry, said in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, there are no rules for human beings, including pure-bred, thin-blooded WASPs. As Mr and Mrs Farnsworth present their respective cases to Gordon and his students, they reveal unexpected facets. Neither emerges as someone entirely to be trusted, but both come off as people of good faith. That is more than can be said of the focus of their argument, Mr Bush, who by the play's end has been effectively cut open and found empty ... Mr and Mrs Farnsworth may be prisoners of their class and its superficial trappings. But like the central figures in Mr Gurney's COCKTAIL HOUR and LATER LIFE, they harbor doubts and conflict beneath their decorous surfaces. While breeding usually trumps their more rebellious instincts, it's not before a human heart is glimpsed within the cartoonish outlines ... Mrs Farnsworth is obviously longing to escape her identity and doomed to fail. It's the longing that makes you like her so much ... 'Political writing and political discussions are simple-minded and reductive, ' Mr Farnsworth says. That's the opposite, he continues, of good writing, 'which should be subtle, complicated and ambiguous.' Even standing on a soapbox, Mr Gurney happily heeds Mr Farnsworth's admonition. -Ben Brantley, The New York Time","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53380922474769,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53380923097361,"sku":"NIN9780881452372","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780881452372.jpg?v=1775510869"},{"product_id":"strictly-academic-book-a-r-gurney-9780881452488","title":"Strictly Academic","description":"This collection includes two short plays: THE GUEST LECTURER and THE PROBLEM. THE GUEST LECTURER: Mona runs a financially strapped regional theatre and takes diabolical steps to keep the venue going. THE PROBLEM: A husband and wife learn of each other's extramarital affairs. For many years, as he was forging his reputation as a playwright, A R Gurney was also a college professor, and in recent plays like HUMAN EVENTS and THE FOURTH WALL he has portrayed campus denizens in not-so-flattering terms. The academic life he depicts is an insular one, the academics themselves self-absorbed and self-important. They behave almost as if they were performing for an audience. Indeed, more than once Mr Gurney has used the university setting to make arguments about the state of the theater, which he also finds insular and self-absorbed, increasingly marginalized and increasingly accepting of its marginalization. In STRICTLY ACADEMIC, an evening of two one acts, Mr Gurney is painting his direst portraits of both the campus and the theater. The opening playlet, THE PROBLEM, is a shrewd, sardonic bit of camp about the sex life of a mathematics professor and his wife ... In a very funny dialogue, the level of their inability to communicate with each other is ratcheted up again and again ... The story takes some imaginative swerves, and the twist at the end is just right ... it gently makes a savage point about academics who live only in their own minds and not in the world. In the concluding play, THE GUEST LECTURER, Mr Gurney has the same mischief in his heart, but bigger things in mind ... There is something terrifically sly and admirable about Mr Gurney's idea here, for what he's constructed is an elaborate, plaintive allegory about what he sees as the strangulation of the theater in America ... any critic will tell you that you can go to the theater nightly and still not come close to keeping up with new work that rarely achieves but often aspires to the level of art. From that perspective, the theater is currently thriving. And Mr Gurney himself is an example of it. -Bruce Weber, The New York Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53429862695185,"sku":"NIN9780881452488","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780881452488.jpg?v=1776418320"},{"product_id":"indian-blood-book-a-r-gurney-9780881453218","title":"Indian Blood","description":"INDIAN BLOD is the story of an adolescent boy trying to stretch his wings in a large and traditional family. A R Gurney's latest play, INDIAN BLOD, is like a snow globe for the stage, in this case a memento of wintry Buffalo in the mid-1940s . Written with delicacy and old-school craftsmanship, INDIAN BLOD is a modest memory play that is endowed with a measure of emotional heft. -Charles Isherwood, The New York Times In INDIAN BLOD, his delightful and touching memory play, A R Gurney takes a break from his recent anti-Bush salvos (MRS FARNSWORTH, SCRENPLAY) and returns to his treasured hometown of Buffalo . INDIAN BLOD can be seen as a companion piece to Gurney's recent political works, for he feels as strongly about what he lost long ago on the shores of Lake Erie as what he now finds daily along the Potomac. Eulogizing the past is just one more way to take a slap at the present. -Robert Simonson, Time Out INDIAN BLOD is smart, diverting and very much worth seeing. -Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal In his sweet and civilized memoir of a sixteen-year-old boy in rebellion against the stuffy values of his upper-middle-class family, prolific scribe A R Gurney deftly sidesteps the deathtrap of narcissism that trips up most coming-of-age plays. -Marilyn Stasio, Daily Variety Much like his fellow American master Horton Foote's evocations of 1900s Texas towns - in tone and exaction, if not style - Gurney's expert accounts of genteel American life are compassionate plays. Lighter in emotional fabric than some of his stories, INDIAN BLOD otherwise proves no exception to Gurney's excellent body of classy works. -Michael Sommers, The Star Ledger","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53429862760721,"sku":"NIN9780881453218","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780881453218.jpg?v=1776418321"},{"product_id":"big-bill-book-a-r-gurney-9780881452341","title":"Big Bill","description":"BIG BILL captures tennis player William Tilden's turbulent life in a series of scenes that shift back and forth in time. Performed on a set that resembles a tennis arena, the play illuminates the sportsman's distinguished career, extravagant style, personal travails, and, ultimately, his calamitous downfall. A fascinating look at the glory of sport, the power of fame, and the anguish of being an outcast. BIG BILL is one of A R Gurney's most affecting plays. When Gurney began writing in the early '70s - the era of Rabe, Babe and Bullins - playwrights were supposed to do quasi-Marxist screeds. His portraits of WASP America seemed out of synch until the early '80s, when THE DINING ROOM made people realize the deep resonance of his work. These days, the authorized topic is homosexuality. Again, Gurney has followed his own path. Although his BIG BILL is about one of the most important tennis players of the 20th century, Bill Tilden, who happened to be a homosexual, Gurney has a deeper focus - the struggle of a man to reconcile the most rigorous WASP standards with sexual inclinations that do not yield to any abstract code. Tilden's high standards are illustrated in the first scene, when we see him outraged at a linesman's ruling - in his favor. Tilden, an athlete of unusual prowess and grace, was also, alas, vain. This led him into a ludicrous career on the stage. His sexual tendencies - his attraction to teenagers - led to his ultimate decline. Gurney depicts this sad trajectory in short, pungent scenes, alternately comic and poignant. -Howard Kissel, Daily News BIG BILL is A R Gurney's impressionistic, jumpy, jaunty biographical play about Bill Tilden, the first tennis superstar, who won zillions of titles in the '20s, maintaining at great cost his enforced status as an amateur until his death in 1953. Like many players then, Tilden came from money - in this case, a rich, old family in Philadelphia. He was an active, though closeted, homosexual, surrounding himself with young ballboys (with whom his relationships varied) and picking up young hustlers, which got him into repeated trouble with the law ... In this short play, Gurney simply presents the story of a damaged but gifted man who never grew up, alongside the absurdities of L A law. On the whole, though, it makes for a lovely theatrical experience. -Donald Lyons, New York Post In BIG BILL ... A R Gurney elegantly considers the cataclysmically unfortunate timing of '20s tennis legend Bill Tilden ... Gurney ... has returned to his specialty, the American WASP, with renewed focus and expanded vision ... we are taken back and forth through the buoyant ups and dignified downs of this complex and, ultimately, inspirational character ... Tilden died alone, in shame, ignored by the tennis association. Gurney imagines a big, appreciative send-off, and finally gives him one here. -Linda Winer, Newsday","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53490226954513,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53490227347729,"sku":"NIN9780881452341","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780881452341.jpg?v=1777732486"},{"product_id":"black-tie-book-a-r-gurney-9780822225263","title":"Black Tie","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53627622228241,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53627622654225,"sku":"CIN0822225263G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780822225263.jpg?v=1780758039"},{"product_id":"a-r-gurney-book-a-r-gurney-9781575252452","title":"A.R. 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