LATER LIFE
But more than just sexual frustration, Gurney’s theme is emotional impotence: this failed fling embodies a lifetime of psychic sterility, a subject that has inspired some of his finest, most elegant writing–and some of his funniest, too. But though this short one-act is an inviting vehicle for lean, sophisticated acting and supports a thoughtful, finely crafted production, finally it suffers from the same aloofness as its hero.
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Inspired in part by Henry James’s 1903 story “The Beast in the Jungle” (not James’s novel The Ambassadors, as last week’s Chicago Tribune review suggested), Later Life concerns Austin, a man who–in the words of Dante’s Inferno, which Austin quotes with typical erudite self-absorption–finds himself “in the middle of the journey of our life . . . within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” Recently divorced and taking Prozac for his depression (the ever-polite Austin visited a psychiatrist only because his children asked him to and he didn’t want to disappoint them), Austin is a successful banker and lifelong resident of Boston, “the Athens of America” and the city where Gurney, a literature professor at MIT, has frequently taught James’s story to undergraduates. A product of Groton and Harvard, Austin is a man whose family has held the same symphony seats for four generations, and who excels at one sport–squash–only if he’s playing in his hometown.
Failing to pursue the implications of such a statement, Later Life leaves us rather like Austin, observant but disconnected from the world. Well played under Russell Vandenbroucke’s direction as a subtly inflected comedy of manners (Jeff Bauer’s terrace set recalls Coward’s Private Lives, the genre’s epitome), Later Life is a showpiece for excellent understated acting. The contrasts between Austin and Ruth and the various eccentric, vital characters who pop on and off the terrace are handled much more believably than they were in the play’s New York production, in which Carole Shelley and Anthony Heald turned the supporting roles into star turns. Here Gross, Thatcher, Vinkler, and Kimbrough function as a balanced ensemble, a sort of theatrical string quartet in which a moody duet for viola and cello is periodically accented by comical violin and bass. Attentive to subtext, these four fine actors take their roles as far as Gurney’s intriguing but inconclusive script–a bittersweet example of the cost of emotional avoidance in playwriting as in life–will allow them.
