Альберт Гёрни: Жизнь и творчество американского драматурга

American dramatist

Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. (November 1, 1930 – June 13, 2017) (sometimes credited as Pete Gurney) was an American playwright, novelist and academic. Gurney is known for plays including The Dining Room (1982), Sweet Sue (1986/7), The Cocktail Hour (1988), and for his Pulitzer Prize nominated play Love Letters (1988). His series of plays about upper class WASP life in contemporary America have been called "penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat." and Marion Spaulding (1908 2001). His parents had three children, of which Gurney was the middle: (1) Evelyn Gurney Miller (b. 1929), (2) Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. (b. 1930), and (3) Stephen S. Gurney (b. 1933). His maternal grandparents were Elbridge G. Spaulding (1881–1974) and Marion Caryl Ely (1887–1971). Ely was the daughter of William Caryl Ely (1856–1921), politician and lawyer, Member of the New York State Assembly in 1883. Gurney's 2x great grandfather was Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897), a former Mayor of Buffalo, NY State Treasurer, and member of the U. S. House of Representatives who supported the idea for the first U. S. currency not backed by gold or silver, thus credited with helping to keep the Union economy afloat during the Civil War. Gurney attended the private school Nichols School in Buffalo and graduating from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He attended Williams College, graduating in 1952, and the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 1958, after which he began teaching Humanities at MIT.

In 1959, following graduation from Yale, Gurney taught English and Latin at a day school, Belmont Hill School, in Belmont, Massachusetts, for one year. He then joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor of humanities (1960–96) and professor of literature (1970–96). Since then, he is known to be a prolific writer. His first play in New York, which ran for just one performance in October 1968, The David Show, premiered at the Players' Theater on MacDougal Street. The play was cut after its first show by sneers from the entire press except for two enthusiasts, Edith Oliver in The New Yorker and another from the Village Voice. Before that, The Grand Manner, a play about his real life encounter with famed actress Katharine Cornell in her production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, was produced and performed by Lincoln Center for the summer of 2010. It was also produced in Buffalo by the Kavinoky Theatre. He appeared in several of his plays including The Dining Room and most notably Love Letters.

Gurney died at his home in Manhattan, on June 13, 2017, at the age of 86.

In 2006, Gurney was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, Gurney received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist. Gurney was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Obie Awards presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Village Voice.

Gurney's plays often explore the theme of declining upper class "WASP" (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) life in contemporary America. The Wall Street Journal has called his works "penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat." In his 1988 play, "The Cocktail Hour", the lead character tells her playwright son that theater critics "don't like us They resent us. They think we're all Republicans, all superficial and all alcoholics. Only the latter [sic] is true." The New York Times described the play as witty observations about a nearly extinct patrician class that regards psychiatry as an affront to good manners, underpaid hired help as a birthright. In a 1989 interview with The New York Times, Gurney said, "Just as it's mentioned in The Cocktail Hour,' my great grandfather hung up his clothes one day and walked into the Niagara River and no one understood why." Gurney added that "he was a distinguished man in Buffalo. My father could never mention it, and it affected the family well into the fourth generation as a dark and unexplainable gesture. It made my father and his father desperate to be accepted, to be conventional, and comfortable. It made them commit themselves to an ostensibly easy bourgeois world. They saw it so precariously, but the reason was never mentioned. I first learned about it after my father died. "</blockquote>