A prolific profiler of middle-class American life, A.R. Gurney has garnered many awards with his popular plays. The Westport Country Playhouse is presenting Gurney’s play Children, which takes place on one day of a Fourth of July weekend. Two adult children replay family dramas as they find out that their mother is going to remarry and that they are about to inherit the house. Their younger brother is a strong off stage presence. Rituals of the upper middle class – divorce, search for self-esteem, family secrets, social graces & gaffes- are their concerns.
Children opens May 26 at Westport Country Playhouse and runs through June 13.
Children is based on a short story by John Cheever. In Goodbye My Brother, Cheever provides a metaphorical struggle between two brothers played out mostly in the ruminations of one brother whose ideas go from lyrical celebration to gloomy dissection of his family’s life. In his usual fashion, Cheever chips away at the certainties of what the character knows, examining the modern, shifting, disrespectful world and then returning to the reassuring stability of the “right way.”
John Cheever never graduated from high school. After failing out of school, he attended Thayer Academy until spring of his junior year when he was expelled. His response was to write a story about the experience. He mailed Expelled to the New Republic; it was accepted and his literary career was launched. Short story fans have a seemingly endless supply of Cheever to read. Critic Dan Schneider says “To not read or not understand these tales is to be as void of the American character as ignoring Dickens is to the English character or Chekhov is to the Russian…”
A new biography Cheever: a life by Blake Bailey is a comprehensive telling of Cheever’s complicated life and serves as a fascinating re-introduction to the man and his works.
