Visitors to either the expansive Connecticut home or Upper West Side apartment of A.R. Gurney are likely to leave with their hands full: A complete set of leather-bound Beaumont Fletcher perhaps, or a full set of pewter dinnerware. Or an old raccoon coat.The 84-year-old playwright and Molly, his wife of over fifty years, are in a generous mood, prompted by an impulse to downsize. “People come in and if they admire something, Molly is apt to say, ‘You like it? You want it? Take it,’” recalls the playwright.As such the couple is kin to Cornelia Cunningham, the lively and wry protagonist of Gurney’s new play, “Love & Money,” which opens on August 24 at the Signature Theatre. On the cusp of moving into what she calls a “nursing home” — a posh retirement facility — the WASP dowager is in the process of giving away her sizable treasure to charity since it has only brought misery on her family: alcoholism, betrayal, suicide, and dearth of ambition.Cornelia is sharing these calamities with a lawyer when a conniving young stranger enters her Manhattan townhouse claiming a right to a portion of the inheritance. The lawyer is outraged, but Cornelia is bemused by the challenge.Her good manners signal that Gurney is back in familiar territory, having charted the decline of his genteel upper class in such plays as “Love Letters,” “The Dining Room,” “The Cocktail Hour,” and, to a lesser extent, “Sylvia,” the 1995 off-Broadway hit which will be revived on Broadway this fall starring Annaleigh Ashford, Julie White, and Matthew Broderick. Gurney spoke with ARTINFO recently about “Love & Money” and how not to become dispossessed of love by one’s possession.Are you as cavalier as Cornelia about letting go of material things? [Laughs.] We try to be and I think we are. One of the hardest things to let go are books. We have a lot of them. A complete set of [Makepeace] Thackery. A complete set of Beaumont Fletcher. A compete set of Dickens, illustrated and beautifully bound in leather. Those have to go. You can't lug those around for the rest of your lives. Cornelia is leaving her grandchildren just enough money to be “constructive”—“Constructive.” I’m glad you said that.And that’s because she believes that money is the root of evil? It leads to alcoholism, or shooting elephants in Africa, and she ticks off a number of bad things that have happened to her family because they’ve had this “safety net” to rely on. You seem to imply that alcoholism is a particular WASP curse.It’s not simply that but it is one of the major problems.In the play, Cornelia lands in a polyglot of what America has become rather than what it was when WASPs were the ruling class. Was that intentional? Yes. Oddly I thought about it but I can’t tell why it happened in quite this way. I wanted someone to show up that was very different from the culture in which she was raised. I didn’t want to write about another money-grubbing WASP. But African-American? Latvian? Asian? I couldn’t tell you why.Are you in sense saying “good riddance” to WASPs as the dominant culture in America?No. I don’t think I am. Let’s see if we can find what is good about that and get rid of all the emphasis on ownership, possession, inheritance, all those things.What is good about it? A sense of manners, of letting some else talk besides yourself, the need to bring others into the conversation. There was a rule in my family which Cornelia brings up: “Never talk about your children because nobody can contribute to the conversation.” And conversation is all? A good part of it. There’s the sense of being part of a community and responding with an awareness of the validity of the individual. I remember when my father was driving me to my first school dance in Buffalo, and I asked him, “How do you talk to with a girl?” I’d been to boys’ schools all my life. And he said, “You converse. And to converse means to ask them about themselves. And then they will ask you what you’ve been doing. And that will be a conversation.” I still think that’s important. I’ll stand by that.What boys’ schools did you attend? Have you been reading the New York Times?Oh, you mean about the “Senior Salute” rape trial case? I went to St. Paul’s [in New Hampshire] for four years. Two of my children and three of my grandchildren also went there. So we’re amazed at the issues. It’s complicated because St. Paul’s is sort of a hermetic universe. When I was there girls could kiss you goodbye. It’s a folksy school in that sense. But this expression the “Senior Salute” has now turned dark and unacceptable…. in this tight environment. You may have noticed that the school has been very quiet because there’s a trial but they’ve also been very quiet because every master in the school probably knew the expression — “The Senior Salute” — but they didn’t know there was a lockable door at the top of one building and that the expression meant a serious sexual relationship with a younger girl.Would you write a play about it? I don’t think I could. I certainly thought about it, but I haven’t really written very much about St. Paul’s School. I got an absolutely first rate education. It was during the war and most of the men were away, but the substitutes were exceptional. I coasted for the first two years I was at Williams College.Is this a case of money being a destructive force when it comes to love and intimacy? I wouldn’t want to quote from my play, but Cornelia does say that money is a magnet and that she and her husband confused the fact that they both had a lot of money and shared the same cultural values with love. They certainly didn’t love each other. Her husband has an affair with a cocktail waitress and he dies months after they marry of a heart attack. That’s certainly destructive.What is the most important thing you’ve taught your children and grandchildren about money?Molly and I are fairly tight about money. We’ve told them, and I hope they’ve realized, that to possess money is not a virtue in and of itself. They should help people who don’t have as much and I think our children have been very good about that. One of our children, I won’t name any name, was having marital difficulties, and so Molly and I went down and said, “What’s the trouble?” And my son said, “We don’t have enough money. I have trouble paying bills and she’s maxing out the credit cards.” So we said, “We’ll handle that for you. We’ll work out a situation where you get a sizable amount of money every month.” So later I called my son, “How’s it going? Has money solved everything?” And he said, “Not quite, Dad. With that money, she bought a horse and spends all her time with your granddaughter learning how to ride the horse and stabling the horse.” So our generous and hopefully frugal way doesn’t always work. Over Labor Day, we’ll have a little congress about money.
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