Albert Ramsdell Gurney, Jr.

Gurney, A[lbert] R[amsdell], Jr. (b. 1930), playwright. A native of Buffalo, New York, he studied at Williams College and at Yale and for years supplemented his writing income by teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His plays reveal him as the logical heir to Philip Barry and S. N. Behrman, time and again presenting an amused look at rich WASP American society, in which mothers doggedly try to squelch their daughters' intellectual aspirations, and shallowness and lovelessness are kept from chaos by a studied observance of polite form. Among his more noted plays have been Scenes from American Life (1971), The Dining Room (1982), The Middle Ages (1982), and The Perfect Party (1986). All these were mounted Off Broadway and at regional theatres. Gurney's first play to reach Broadway was Sweet Sue (1987), but he had better luck Off Broadway with subsequent works such as The Cocktail Hour (1988), Love Letters (1989), Later Life (1993), Sylvia (1995), Overtime (1996), Labor Day (1998), Far East (1999), Ancestral Voices (1999), and O Jerusalem (2003).