I’ve always had a soft spot for A.R. Gurney, aka theater’s unofficial documentarian of WASP culture. The prolific playwright, who died in June 2017 at age 86, possessed a vastly underrated, and all-too-rare, ability to craft characters without caricature and comedy without condescendence. It’s easy to see the well-bred inhabitants of The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour as martini-swilling artifacts; it’s harder to see them as real people—which they often were. “That was very much my family on stage,” Gurney once said.
So it’s hard to be too terribly disappointed in Gurney’s Final Follies, an uneven but amusing triptych of something-old, something-new shorts at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Even when Gurney was off his game, he still knew how to land a well-placed barb.
Which brings us to Gurney’s last play, finished just before his death, “Final Follies,” the curtain-raiser and the off-his-game portion of the show. The eye-rolling premise? Failed prep-school teacher/alcoholic former bank executive Nelson (Colin Hanlon) answers an ad for porn films—or, as actress–turned–casting director Tanisha (Rachel Nicks) quickly corrects him, “discreet adult videos which have therapeutic value.” Nelson is handsome in that rumpled Ralph Lauren kind of way, and, without seeing him naked, Tanisha knows that he’ll “rise to the occasion.” Ahem. Nelson also has a perverse obsession with the decline and the perpetuation of WASP culture, and an urgent need to explore his fast-fading roots by sailing the New England coast. “I want to hook onto some rusty buoy in places like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and drink Martini cocktails with my fellow tribesmen while we watch the sun sink over the Yacht Club,” he tells Tanisha in what he thinks is a come-on. Even more ridiculous than Nelson’s nautical fantasy—did we mention that he doesn’t know how to sail?—is the arrival of his brother Walter (Mark Junek), who discovers Nelson’s X-rated oeuvre and shows a clip to their very rich, very old-fashioned grandfather (Greg Mullavey). Someone get gramps another scotch.
Fortunately, director David Saint, a Gurney pro, has set up his show like a relay: Start the race with your weakest runner, and finish with your strongest. The second short, “The Rape of Bunny Stuntz”—the 53-year-old play, one of Gurney’s earliest, was originally produced at the Cherry Lane—makes a stronger statement, casting the audience as participants in an unspecified town meeting, led by newly elected chairman Bunny (a flawless Deborah Rush). Despite her helmet-hard blond bouffant and crisply starched floral dress, Bunny is clearly concealing a dark side. The purpose of the meeting, she explains, is that “all of us are in some way unhappy people. Oh not un-happy-unhappy. Heaven forbid!” She tries to laugh but the sound sort of curdles in her throat. “Husband, children, home—they just don’t—fill the gap, do they?” Handyman-type Howie (Piter Marek) and mousy quasi-assistant Wilma (Betsy Aidem) are hoping to get happy in the cafeteria, where there’s coffee, beer, and, as Wilma says, “song and laughter and casual, harmless sex-play.” But Bunny can’t seem to escape a mysterious menacing man who taunts her from the wings. “We have never crossed paths or swords or anything else,” insists Bunny, her tight-lipped smile—honed by years of repression and gin—starting to crack. “You can look at my calendar. Anybody can. I’m perfectly willing to make it public.” Everything about the shady unseen figure—even his car, an Impala (“I mean, who do we want to impale, anyway?” she cries)—threatens Bunny and her carefully structured suburban utopia. “I believe that children, with haircuts, in polo coats, going to see their grandmothers are more important than some cheap, cheap, cheap disgusting tussle with a strange man.” The lady doth protest too much, no?
The third and final short on the bill, “The Love Course,” will tickle all the English majors in the house. Anyone who ever had an overly demonstrative, hyper-enthusiastic instructor will recognize the tweedy Professor Burgess (Piter Marek), a self-described Renaissance man, and the flamboyant Professor Carroway (Betsy Aidem, whirling her kimono sleeves and tossing her beaded necklaces with élan), a Romantic if ever there was one. They’re sharing a course on “the literature of love”—titles include Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, and more—which has riled up not only their own passions but also that of their students, Sally (Rachel Nicks) and her engineering-student boyfriend Mike (Colin Hanlon). Carroway has a rather pessimistic view of love (“Name a book, name a love story worthy of the name, that does not end with the death of the lady”); Burgess is more practical: “My wife introduced me to paddle tennis.” Is it any wonder they’ve built an entire course around books about adultery?
And in case you’re wondering, the Bunny Stuntz calendar quip was not added after last week’s Kavanaugh hearings. Perhaps clairvoyance was another one of Gurney’s unheralded talents.
Final Follies opened Oct. 2, 2018, and runs through Oct. 21 at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Tickets and information: primarystages.org
