THE
Respectful
AN INTERVIEW WITH
A.R.Gurney
Signature is excited to welcome playwright Albert Ramsdell
Gurney, Jr. — “Pete” to his friends — as one of two Residency One
playwrights this season. Gurney is one of the most prolific
contemporary American playwrights; he has written steadily
since the 1950s and his extensive body of work includes over forty
plays, with many productions throughout the country and abroad.
During Gurney’s Residency, Signature will re-examine his rarelyseen plays The Wayside Motor Inn (1977) and What I Did Last
Summer (1983) this 2014-15 Season and conclude the series with
the world premiere of a new play in the 2015-16 Season. Gurney’s
impressive and wide-ranging oeuvre points to a writer who never
stops exploring, and we are thrilled to join him as he embarks
upon his fifth decade of playwriting.
One of Gurney’s major explorations in his work is looking at tradition and how people respond to the changing world around
them. Gurney grew up in Buffalo, NY in an environment of summer homes and dinner parties, a world he draws upon and scrutinizes in his work. Many of his plays, such as The Dining Room, Love Letters, and The Cocktail Hour, harken back to his upper
class roots, poignantly exploring how tightly held traditions can make even the most sensitive, earnest characters ill-prepared
for the future. The outside world bears down on Gurney’s characters in subtle, yet resounding ways and he follows them as
they witness the vanishing ritual of the cocktail hour, confront the dawn of the Bush administration, and navigate military
culture in Japan in the 1950s. His character-driven work is also formally inventive. His play Richard Cory is choral, Scenes from
American Life is a series of vignettes, The Snow Ball takes the shape of a musical, and The Wayside Motor Inn, the first of
Gurney’s productions at Signature, is a cacophonous work with overlapping stories. In The Wayside Motor Inn five scenes
unfold simultaneously onstage in one motel room outside Boston. Signature’s new production of this rarely-produced work
reveals characters on a precipice — their lives will shift as soon as they leave the inn.
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