Plays that have been dismissed the first time around rarely get a second chance. So it’s understandable that A.R. Gurney, known as Pete, is thrilled that his 1977 play, “The Wayside Motor Inn,” has “come back to the roost” at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre and to demonstrate that it has value after all.
“It was kind of amazing when I finally saw the play take shape onstage,” recalled the 83-year-old playwright. “I kept asking myself, ‘Did I write that?’ ‘Did I know that then?’ I really had not looked at the play since I wrote it and very few people had either.”
Indeed, it’s been a long exile for “The Wayside Motor Inn,” which was initially greeted by a sour New York Times review with the headline, “‘Inn’ Left by Wayside.” The play recently opened to strong notices, including an approving one from the Times, hailing the achievement of director Lila Neugebauer and a first-rate ensemble. The play’s limited run has been extended twice, now through October 5.
“Wayside” is a complicated drama in which five couples play out their respective longings in a Boston motel room. Although the individual stories are concurrent, the characters never actually intersect with the exception of one pivotal scene. A father comes to the room of an older couple to ask for a sewing kit. He wants to repair the shirt that moments earlier he had ripped off his son’s back in a fit of anger over his son’s reluctance to attend Harvard. The older couple have their own frustrations, including the specter of mortality and a remote concern for the college-age students who arrive at the inn to cement a sexual and moral bond. The other pairs — a horny salesman flirting with a sassy room service waitress and a battling married couple — demonstrate the timeless, if often futile, attempt to connect.
“Although the couples never meet, I wanted to convey the idea that we’re all in this together,” Gurney said.
That has been a leitmotif of sorts throughout the career of the prolific playwright, who can look back on an oeuvre of more than 50 works and look forward to a banner year. Not only is the Signature producing three of his plays — joining “Wayside” will be a revival of his 1983 drama, “What I Did Last Summer,” and the premiere of a new play, “Love and Money” — but his 1989 epistolary hit, “Love Letters,” will be back on Broadway this fall. In a limited engagement from September 13 through February 1, the two-hander features a rotating cast of major stars: Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow, Dennehy and Carol Burnett, Alan Alda and Candice Bergen, Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg, and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen.
In a recent interview with ARTINFO, Gurney spoke of how the Signature convinced him to revive a play that he had left for dead and whether the act of writing letters in cursive is a lost art in an era of email and text messages.
What did you think when the Signature came to you with one of your more obscure efforts?
I thought, “I don’t think I’ll let you do that.” It was badly reviewed and didn’t appeal to audiences. But the Signature is loaded with young people and they thought it was good idea and wanted to give it a try, so I went along with that.
In “What I Did Last Summer,” one of the characters refers to her modeling clay as “the muck of life.” Is that what you’re dealing with in “Wayside”?
When I wrote the play in the mid-’70s, I did sense the world significantly changing. Many of our friends were getting divorced, the older people were left to visit their grandchildren because they wouldn’t visit them, the family was breaking up, and there was this obsession with college entrance. I taught at MIT and there was the importance of making the right impression on the person who is interviewing you. I also saw, at the time, that the decision of college-age couples to live together was fraught. So, yes, there’s a lot of people in the play trying to take bigger steps and paying for them.
“Wayside” has been compared to the work of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. But there is something Chekhovian about it, isn’t there?
I don’t think Chekhov is interested in scenic puzzles as is Ayckbourn, but as far as an attitude toward life and the ambiguities of why we do things, I like to think I have some similarity to Chekhov. I didn’t want to make the ending solutions too pat.
“Wayside” is anomalous insofar as it doesn’t deal with the WASP culture, a mainstay of your work.
Well, I got into that because this play was so resoundingly unsuccessful that I decided that’s not a direction I want to continue on. So more and more I wrote about the cultural world I grew up in and how that’s become increasingly obsolete through the years.
In “Love Letters,” over the course of a 50-year correspondence, Melissa Gardner rejects that WASP culture while Andrew Makepeace Ladd III embraces it. Why does she not also reject him?
I don’t know. Very simply, I’m not sure of this, but I think he’s always interested in her, always tries to communicate with her, always tries to encourage her to the degree that he can, always tries to go to her art shows.
Do you think it’s some sort of recognition on her part that she can’t entirely disassociate herself from that world, no matter how much she tries?
I think that he would probably be one example of that. She tries every kind of art but she needs to express herself over and against the culture in which she grew up, and the culture at least speaks back to her through Andy and in a non-critical way. He encourages her in a way that nobody else does. Certainly not her mother, father, stepfather, or any of the various types she marries.
Does Andy like her art?
Every actor might play it differently. When I play it, I don’t like her art but I want to be polite about it. I admire the fact that she’s trying.
Can you love somebody whose art you don’t like?
I think so, don’t you? You have to be tactful about the art. But yeah, I think you can.
You’ve got a rotating cast of stars in “Love Letters”…
I think they’re all terrific actors. My hope is, as we continue and I hope we do, that we can both get younger and middle-aged actors, people of different ages to play the part. When we first did it at the Long Wharf, the casting was of people right down the fairway, in their 40s and 50s. Then I was at a party and Elaine Stritch came up to me and said, “I want to do your blankety-blank play.” I didn’t want to tell her that I thought she was too old so I said, “Well, who would you get to play it?” And she said, “I’ve already gotten somebody. Jason Robards.” And they did fine. But Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt did it and they were in their mid-20s. And it worked!
Do you think the art of letter writing, in cursive, is a lost world?
Yeah, I really do. I have eight grandchildren and I constantly ask them if they use the cursive style. Most of them communicate through a machine. And when they do write, it’s printed and not on personal writing paper and the printing’s not very good. They don’t read either. Facebook and all that, sure, but they don’t read books. I have a grandson who is in college and I tell him, “You’ll do better when you learn to read and write.” [laughs]
