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About the play –
In his 1995 review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby offered an opening teaser for Gurney’s newest comedy. “Greg, middle-aged and middle class, returns to his Upper West Side apartment in the late afternoon accompanied by Sylvia, a beautiful, frisky young thing he has just picked up in the park. He sits in his favorite chair, worried (with some reason) about how Kate, his wife, is going to respond to Sylvia. Sylvia doesn’t make things easy. Too excited to settle down, she moves around the room checking out the furniture.
She turns to Greg.
Sylvia: I think you’re God.
Greg (trying to maintain order): Stay, Sylvia. Stay. And sit.
Sylvia: I want to sit near you.
Greg: Well all right. Sylvia moves to his side.
Sylvia (dreamily): Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Greg (being severe): OK. As long as you sit.
She doesn’t really sit on the floor. She obediently collapses onto it, resting her chin on his knee while staring up at him with blind adoration. What man could resist?”
While Canby goes on to illuminate the situation by explaining how this work offers us a romantic triangle involving Greg, his wife Kate, and a stray dog named Sylvia, the critic also praises the theatrical intelligence and writerly skill of this comic gem. Full of clever contemporary language, a delicious understanding of the complications and convolutions of dog ownership in New York City, and the charming and challenging midlife crisis of Greg, Sylvia is Gurney’s “social comedy.” It is an examination of human behaviors with some eye to correction, self-awareness, and humanity. The play belongs to the 1000 year tradition of charming and “reformative” comedies that ask us what it means to be social animals (literally in this case) and to be in love, in conflict, in passionate discourse, and in a thoughtful existence with regard to the world and our place in it.
About this production –
For director Patricia Troxel, this play offers audiences a clever paradox -- a classic love triangle of two women and a man with their divided loyalties and passions coupled with a not so classic love triangle of a man, his wife and his newly adopted dog. Or is it a man, his wife and his new fascination – part partner/part mistress/part soul mate? While delighting audiences with its double entendres, both visual and verbal, this comedy explores desire and disappointment, refuge and redemption, wit and a good walk in the park. It’s also about how we experience the second thirty years of life. This is not a play about youth; it is rather a play of middle age and the discoveries both good and bad we make when we are forever over 35.
With set designer Dave Nofsinger, Troxel melds Sylvia’s spacial worlds from a New York City apartment to airport lounges, from Central Park to a psychiatrist’s office in a play on the light, texture, and restriction of metropolitan life. The sound score of this production, by Walter Clissen, celebrates the great vocal energy of American jazz, blues, and Cole Porter – a Manhattanesque tribute to the romance and heartache of New York. The costumes of Juliane Starks help blur the distinctions of character between man and woman, and between woman and dog, as this comedy does ask us to consider how, what, and why we respond to gender and gender-based attitudes. Sylvia is truly interested in what makes both the modern man and the modern woman.
About the playwright –
Born in 1930 Buffalo, NY, A(lbert) R(amsdell) Gurney has become one of the leading figures of the American Literary scene. Educated at elite schools such as Williams College and Yale Drama School, Gurney wrote his first play (and Yale Drama’s school’s first musical) Love in Buffalo in 1958. His working partner at drama school was Stephen Sondheim. Since that time he has prolifically penned both comic and dramatic plays including such successes as The Dining Room (1981), The Cocktail Hour (1988), and Sylvia (1995). His canon of works numbers over 40 plays, numerous essays, and three novels.
While noted primarily as a writer on “issues and realities of middle-class WASP life,” his plays have been produced throughout the world. In addition to his work as a novelist and playwright, Gurney was on the faculty of MIT until 1996. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Drama Desk Award, a Rockefeller, 2 Lucille Lortels (1989, 1994) and significant support from the NEA. In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As his bio wittily states, “he is the husband of one, the father of four, and the grandfather of eight.”
His Love Letters (1989) enjoyed instant and continuing success with its two characters reading “the letters” of a 50 year relationship side by side on a simple stage. The co-stars for this clever work have ranged from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward to Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, and the work has been produced from coast to coast by most regional and community theatres. Gurney’s newest work, The Grand Manner, premieres at Lincoln Center theatre in June 2010; a “love letter” to the actress Katherine Cornell, the play celebrates both the diva and the heyday of the Broadway stage. |
