ANOTHER ANTIGONE
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But Gurney does more in his plays than merely mirror upper-class attitudes and mores. For one, Gurney, who’s a tenured professor at MIT, keeps the WASP power elite at an ironic distance in his work, spending as much time puncturing his puffed-up WASP protagonists as he spends puffing them up. For another, he has an exquisite sense of dramatic structure. There is nothing slipshod or bloated about his writing. His stories unfold at a comfortable pace; his dialogue is at once polished and believable; and his work often resonates on several levels–in Cocktail Hour, for example, the play that the playwright son describes to his boozy but successful businessman father turns out to be the play we are watching.
Finally, Gurney doesn’t shy away from exploring the darker sides of his characters: their alcoholism, their self-pity, their muted fear and distrust of all the non-Anglo-Saxons in America who would like a piece of the American pie.
(Such comparisons are ludicrous, of course, as Gurney pointed out in an interview two years ago in the New York Times. After all, Greek culture itself was riven by the conflict between public and private morality; even in Sophocles’ Antigone the major conflict is between Creon’s sense of his duty as king to uphold the order and Antigone’s private need to give her brother a proper burial.)
