New York theatre
Later Life (Westside Theater)
Wasp in a web
Douglas Colby
Amatchmaking hostess tells her guest Austin, 'I'm setting the stage here', as she leads him from a cocktail party on to an apartment terrace, but it is nature that pro- vides the ironic backdrop for the long- interrupted courtship between him and his lost love Ruth. Across the evening sky of Boston Harbor that overlooks the action of A.R. Gurney's Later Life, stars in their iso- lation seem to reflect the unlikelihood of the pair's ever finding a pathway to each other. Yet, on the terrace, when this lonely middle-aged banker is given a second chance to connect with the love he gave up decades ago on the isle of Capri, he must wrestle again with his deep-rooted inability to act on human longing.
When Ruth first appears Austin fails to recognise her face, but as they chat we learn that they met when he was a young naval officer on leave and she a touring college student. He knew instantly that he liked her more than anyone he had ever met. Yet, when she invited him to her room, he drew away from her permanently.
His excuse to her and to himself was that he was sparing her from something terrible that he believed would descend on him in the course of his life. The truth is that Austin is, above all else, a White Anglo- Saxon Protestant who suffers from the paralysis often associated with such a sti- fling background. Brought up by surrogate parents and servants and never allowed to explore his emotions, he cultivated only insecurities, a pro forma approach to human intercourse and, most of all, a reluctance to take chances. Gurney points up with Jamesian irony that the 'something terrible' holding Austin back was a self- fulfilling prophecy.
As the American theatre's foremost commentator on the social and private worlds of the Wasp, Gurney has faced the paradox of probing the depths of a cultural group typically thought to live on the sur- face of life. And he has solved this difficul- ty with a unique, sketch-like style whose smallest details of character and structure betray in this rarefied air (here in only 80 minutes of stage-time) the hidden miasma.
In one humorous dash of character reve- lation, for example, Austin dismisses psy- choanalysis as something forced upon him by his children and lost on him as a man disinclined to introspection. In contradic- tion, he later lapses into a pained, self- contemplative, almost poetic description of his upbringing as a fly caught in a vertical- horizontal web of Wasp civility.
The play's great cartoon conceit is having only two actors portray all the other party guests who wander on to the terrace, either singly or in couples, and who, undeterred by Austin's too-well-trained politesse, get in the way of his and Ruth's smooth reunion. Each intrusion is hilarious: a pair of dod- dering old-timers; a duo of hypocritical Southern bigots; Austin's developmentally arrested preppie schoolmate. It is only in retrospect we realise that, as a group, they are an echo of the chaotic societal forces that have made certain our couple's romantic centre will not hold.
By the play's conclusion we have seen the range of tragedy that has fallen upon them both: Austin with a bitter divorce and an aura of aimlessness, Ruth, still worse, with her first husband's accidental death, two divorces, her child's death from leukaemia and a current marriage to a brutish gambler from Las Vegas (the oppo- site, Gurney slyly hints, of the overly civilised, non-chancing Austin from conser- vative Boston). Whichever position each person has taken toward life's element of luck, we, at a distance, view how the chain of unhappiness originated in one moment's wrong, throw-of-the-dice decision.
The production, directed by Don Scardi- no, does exactly as it should, keeping us amused and lightly touched until it dumps us into a realisation of the profound sad- ness underneath. The four actors negotiat- ing the mood shifts are wonderful, especially the chameleon-like Carole Shel- ley, with her satirical impersonations of droning or fast-talking society women.
Most effective of all is the stark setting by the renowned Ben Edwards, which brings into focus the script's wide-ranging thematic design. At the play's end, when Ruth has left for the airport to fly away with her husband, she leaves her sweater behind as a last-minute test to see if Austin, having escaped the spiritual shack-
les of his youth, will pursue her in a chival- rous gesture. Edwards's mirroring sky, which began as a romantic shade of cobalt, has by now darkened into an ominous navy, as Austin the ex-marine, no longer emo- tionless, tightens his grip on Ruth's gar- ment. But, like the stars in their isolation just where they were at the beginning, Austin stands immobile, looking across at life's party..
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