Among its seasons since 2002, Primary Stages presented five new plays by A.R. Gurney, a fine and prolific dramatist remembered best as a master interpreter of white upper middle class American life. Shortly before Gurney left this world in 2017, he completed Final Follies, a one-act comedy. Gurney reportedly suggested to his agent that Primary Stages might produce it.
Indeed this came to pass on Tuesday night at the Cherry Lane Theatre, where Primary Stages places Gurney’s very last piece alongside two of his earliest plays, The Rape of Bunny Stuntz (1965) and The Love Course (1969), with the notion of offering glimpses of the playwright’s work at the dawn and at the conclusion of his career.
In theory, the program is meant as a thoughtful tribute to a distinctive author. In actuality, it doesn’t work out well. None of these slim plays represent Gurney in his funniest or wisest modes.
Final Follies is a little cartoon regarding Nelson, an amiable preppy past his prime, who has never succeeded at anything, nor wanted to. Nelson somehow charms Tanisha, a casting director, into giving him a shot in the adult film industry. Surprisingly, mild-mannered Nelson proves to be stellar as a porn stud. Then his strait-laced brother goes on the warpath and tries to turn their wealthy grandfather against Nelson.
An awfully slight item, Final Follies tosses out a few mild japes about wasp-y culture, but the play adds up to zero. It is said that Gurney usually did extensive rewrites on his texts during rehearsals. He was not, of course, available to bolster this trifle. It is a disservice to Gurney’s artistic legacy to produce such a sketchy effort.
Likewise, The Rape of Bunny Stuntz is merely a curiosity. Its title figure is a prim suburban matron who is confusedly running a civic meeting. Bunny eventually becomes distracted by a flashy stranger lurking offstage in the wings who evidently embodies her suppressed desires. Although such a theme seems old-chapeau today–and it probably seemed that way then—the play’s situation, which sees Bunny and others directly addressing viewers as if they were attending the meeting, is an early example of a gambit that Gurney sometimes would employ in his future works.
Gurney uses it again in The Love Course, which treats the audience as if they were students in a classroom where two professors are co-teaching a seminar in romantic literature. It is obvious from the get-go that rapturous Professor Carroway, all fluttering draperies and swooning gestures, is fated to be mated with the buttoned-down Professor Burgess, who vainly tries to resist her dizzy charms. The play’s amusement comes from simply watching the inevitable unfold. Gurney taught the classics at M.I.T for more than 20 years, so he knew whereof he wrote here.
Betsy Aidem and Piter Marek provide zestful turns as these distracted educators. They further lend their energies to other folks amid The Rape of Bunny Stuntz, where a chirping Deborah Rush delivers a glassy portrayal of the glossy lady in question. Colin Hanlon and Rachel Nicks gracefully skate together over the dangerously thin ice of Final Follies, which features a cameo by Greg Mullavey as the family patriarch. David Murin dresses everybody with wise insight.
David Saint, the director, gives the plays a tidy staging upon designer James Youmans’ shiny, minimal setting of luminous tiles and portals. Fostering an ominous edge to The Rape of Bunny Stuntz might have lent that piece some needed dramatic weight, but there was little else that Saint could do with the flimsy others than to move them along quickly and lightly, which he ably does.
Final Follies opened October 2, 2018, at the Cherry Lane Theatre and runs through October 21. Tickets and information: primarystages.org
