TT: Grandfather knows best

I review the premiere of A.R. Gurney’s new play, Black Tie, in the Greater New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, nor can any playwright, however gifted, hope to produce them every time he sits down at his desk. It is in the nature of things that there must also be well-made pieces of intelligent entertainment to keep our fancies tickled, and there must be enough of them to keep actors from standing on unemployment lines and critics from going mad with boredom. Therefore let us now praise A.R. Gurney, who writes a play or two each year, some of them inspired, others merely solid, but all guaranteed to send you home feeling that you wasted neither time nor money by seeing them. “Black Tie,” Mr. Gurney’s latest effort, falls into the second class, scoring 100% on the intelligent-entertainment checklist.
“Black Tie” is the latest of Mr. Gurney’s reports from the land of the upper-middle-class WASP. The scene is a decent but undistinguished hotel in the Adirondacks where Curtis (Gregg Edelman) is about to throw a rehearsal dinner for his soon-to-be-wed son (Ari Brand). As he dons evening dress and mulls over his speech, the ghost of Curtis’ own late father (Daniel Davis) materializes to cheer him on and brush up his vocabulary: “Gentlemen wear trousers. Gents wear pants.” It soon emerges that Curtis needs a lot of cheering, for his son is about to marry a woman of multicolored hue who disdains the gentleman’s code that Curtis learned from his genial but ever-so-proper father….
One of the things I admire about Mr. Gurney is his iron professionalism. While “Black Tie” is slight by comparison with “The Grand Manner,” his last play, or “Sylvia,” which was so engagingly revived last month by Florida Repertory Theatre, it’s much more than sufficiently amusing. It never surprised me, but it never bored me….
* * *
The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review by going here.