Fireworks Ignite Frozen Lives

NEW YORK — So much that was written by A.R. Gurney, the very American playwright who died last year at 86, could have been subtitled “Death of a Dinosaur.” Not that anything as apocalyptic as an ice age, or even as melodramatic as a murder, shadows the discreetly lighted drawing and dining rooms, the private clubs and terraces with views, in which much of Gurney’s work takes place.

Yet in play after play, this prolific and elegant dramatist — whose hauntingly sober comedy “Later Life” has been revived by the Keen Co. — created characters who were facing the Darwinian end of their species.

The classic Gurney type was pale of skin (though slightly ruddier after summers in Maine or winters in Florida), courteous by nature and descended from a long and unbroken line of Anglo-Saxons.

When confronted with the threat of its imminent demise, this subspecies does not assume the fight-or-flight crouch common to creatures in jeopardy. No, the default posture for this endangered being in moments of crisis is polite passivity.

Or as a bemused observer in “Later Life” notes of its classically Gurney protagonist, “When you die, you’ll probably say, ‘Excuse me.'”

That character, a recently divorced banker and lifelong resident of Boston, is named Austin. In the production of “Later Life” that opened Wednesday night at Theater Row, he is portrayed by Laurence Lau, who has the generic, square-jawed handsomeness of the Arrow Collar Man, once the standard for bland virility in 20th-century advertising.

Unlike Charles Kimbrough, who created the part in the play’s 1993 premiere, Lau invests Austin with very little comic idiosyncrasy.

His version of the character is upright, forthright and transparent almost to the point of invisibility. Similarly, the revival in which he appears, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, is most notable for its lucidity. It’s a gentle production that lets Gurney speak for himself, without flashy interpretive obstructions.

While this approach may not make for thrilling theater, it does allow you to see Gurney plain. And I came away from this production with new respect for “Later Life,” which now seems to me one of his most eloquent statements on an archetype that hears the chimes at midnight almost from the moment of birth.

The plot of this 90-minute work functions as a sort of lab experiment for our dubious hero. Austin goes to a party at a friend’s house and is introduced to a woman named Ruth (a down-to-earth Barbara Garrick), who tells him they have met before, when he was stationed with the Navy in Italy several decades earlier.

Guided to the quiet of the terrace by their host (the al fresco set is by Steven Kemp, with autumnal lighting by David Lander), Austin and Ruth become increasingly attracted to each other.

Our almost-lovers’ conversation is periodically interrupted by an assortment of other guests (all appealingly embodied by Jodie Markell and Liam Craig, in quick-change mode). These intruders are, like Austin and Ruth, in their late middle age.

And they wonder, via subjects that range from quitting smoking to moving house, how much they are still capable of change.

Gurney lets us know he is putting Austin’s adaptability to the test from the very beginning. “I’m setting the stage here,” says Sally (Markell), the party’s host, in the play’s opening lines, as she arranges a terrace table for two. “That’s all I can do. Just set the stage.”

Enter Ruth, attractive and newly separated and a reminder of the many roads Austin has never taken. She hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him since their brief first encounter, she tells him, mostly because of his assertion as a young man that his life, even then, was a process of “waiting for something terrible to happen.”

In prefatory notes for “Later Life,” Gurney thanks the great American novelist Henry James. And this play seems to be a variation of sorts on James’ novella “The Beast in the Jungle” (which, by the way, has been newly adapted in a play with music that opens in May at the Vineyard Theater).

If you know the plot of James’ “Beast,” you know how things will turn out. That “Later Life” still engages us has to do with how carefully the script allows its hero the chance to break his stasis.

But Austin just can’t rise to the opportunity. Gurney has created this paradoxical loser of a born winner — a man whom life has blessed with creature comforts and stability — with equal compassion and exasperation.

This production doesn’t ultimately provide the emotional payoff we were hoping for, but it reminds us of what a craftsman Gurney was, and how many rueful shades of warmth he could find in frozen lives. Lau’s performance provides just enough hopeful signals of melting for us to feel the bona fide tragedy of a man — and a class — doomed to extinction.

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Production Notes:

“Later Life”

Tickets Through April 14 at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-947-8844. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Jonathan Silverstein; sets by Steven Kemp; costumes by Jennifer Paar; lighting by David Lander; sound by Obadiah Eaves; props by Ricola Wille; wigs, hair and makeup by Dave Bova and J. Jared Janas; production manager and line producer, Corinne Woods; production stage manager, Arthur Atkinson. Presented by Keen Co., Jonathan Silverstein, artistic director.

With: Jodie Markell (Sally and others), Laurence Lau (Austin), Liam Craig (Jim and others) and Barbara Garrick (Ruth).