Later Life and Two Other Plays: The Snow Ball and the Old Boy

by A. R. Gurney

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"Playwright A. R. Gurney has become a national treasure with his portrayals of that quintessential American type, the New England WASP, and with his witty, unexpectedly heart-hitting dialogue. This collection of three recent plays, all produced in the 1990s, brings us incomparable Gurney - mature, masterful, and hilarious. In the hugely successful Later Life, a Boston banker and a woman he had a romantic interlude with thirty years earlier reunite at a cocktail party. In The Snow Ball, a show more play with music and dancing, another couple tried to recapture their youth with poignant results. And in The Old Boy, an Under Secretary of State returns to his prep school alma mater for a graduation day speech - and a stunning confession. All three works skillfully juxtapose conflicting emotions to blend wit with sadness, self-realization with self-delusion, and barren interior lives with the facade of prosperous middle-class existences. The result in each case is first-rate theater - comedic drama that works its magic on the stage and inside the audience's hearts."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved show less

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80+ Works 1,379 Members
Albert Ramsdell Gurney was born in Buffalo, New York on November 1, 1930. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, served for several years as an officer in the Navy, and then enrolled in the playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama. After graduation, he taught English at a private school and then joined the faculty at the show more Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught American literature and the humanities until the early 1980s. He was a prolific playwright and an author. His plays included The Dining Room, The Middle Ages, The Cocktail Hour, The Perfect Party, Another Antigone, Love Letters, The Old Boy, Later Life, Labor Day, Far East, Sylvia, The Fourth Wall, O Jerusalem, Mrs. Farnsworth, Screen Play, and Post Mortem. His novels included The Gospel According to Joe, Entertaining Strangers, and The Snow Ball. He died on June 13, 2017 at the age of 86. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Genre
Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
812.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican drama in English20th Century1945-1999
LCC
PS3557 .U82 .L37Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
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