From Booklist
Gurney's eminently stageworthy comedies are about the real WASPs, who are taught ballroom dancing early and dispatched to prep schools and Ivy League colleges later. Gurney makes these people, whom he customarily finds in middle age, and their predicaments as convincing and absorbing as any in contemporary American theater. To be sure, Gurney's menhe focuses more on the male than the female WASP psycheare all rather like George Bush, a romantic, finally rather noble George Bush. They are this even when they are also, like Austin, the fortyish protagonist of Later Life, genuinely pathetic. At a party, Austin meets a woman who remembers a tryst with him when both were fresh out of college. She especially recalls his come-on. She's willing to renew and deepen the romance, but he . . . still has just the same old come-on. The leading men in the other plays are more active. Cooper Jones in The Snow Ball wants to revive the great winter dance of his youthheck, and young passion with it!and get Jack and Kitty, the supreme dancers of his youthful set, together on the ballroom floor one last time. He succeeds, but only at what's possibledreams remain dreams. Nobler yet, in The Old Boy, Sam, an undersecretary of state and top contender for governor, returns to his prep school to give a commencement address in which he, to his own surprise and at the possible cost of his ambitions, chastises himself and his social class for being true to form rather than to a friend's human needs. In the hands of a less adroit playwright, these plays might each melt into sentimentality. In Gurney's, they glow like burnished pearls. Ray Olson
