Scenes from American Life by A. R. Gurney

First published: 1970

First produced: 1970, at Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: From the 1930’s to the near future

Locale: Buffalo, New York

Principal Characters:

• Father, a well-to-do white American
• Mother, his wife
• Snoozer, their son

The Play

Scenes from American Life is a collection of nearly forty short scenes connected by scraps of period music, each scene showing a glimpse of life in upper-middle-class Buffalo over the course of about fifty years. A few of the characters appear in more than one scene, but most do not. Most of the characters are not even named; each is instantly recognizable, however, by his or her type.

The play begins in the early 1930’s, with the entrance of a maid carrying a tray of martinis. She is followed by a group of guests, including a Godfather and Godmother, and finally by Father, the Bishop, and Mother, who carries a doll dressed in an elaborate christening gown. As Father and the Bishop talk about the new son who has just been christened, Mother worries that the child has no suitable nickname.

This first scene sets the tone for those that will follow. Conversation during the party turns to the Depression (which affects other people, but not these), the high-quality bootleg gin smuggled in for the event, the baby’s sterling silver presents, proper manners, and the Bible. These are well-to-do white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), with nothing more pressing on their minds than getting through this party. As the scene ends with the baby’s tipsy Godmother spilling her drink on the child, Mother finds the perfect nickname for him: Snoozer, “because he sleeps through everything.”

The next scene, which lasts only about a minute, occurs in or just before the 1970’s, with a Speaker explaining to an audience the history behind the name Buffalo. He and Snoozer, the Speaker says, have discovered that the name is not from the animal, but from the French beau fleuve, meaning “beautiful river.” As great ships once floated into Buffalo’s port, he explains, the city now should float a new bond issue to build a stadium of which the city can be proud.

With the third scene, the play returns to the 1930’s, this time presenting a Mother (but not Snoozer’s mother) chastising her child’s nurse for entertaining a man in her room. After a dialogue in which the Mother speaks sternly to the nurse about responsibility and morality, the nurse is dismissed, and the Mother turns to the telephone, where she makes arrangements for a secret meeting with her lover.

In this manner the play progresses. The characters survive World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War apparently unscathed. They play tennis, undergo analysis to deal with drinking problems, take dancing lessons, throw parties, discuss their stock portfolios, wonder whether perhaps Jews should (some day) be admitted to their club; date acceptable people, marry unhappily, and, rarely and briefly, ponder the emptiness of it all. One young woman is offered two choices by her parents: a college education or a coming-out party. A grandfather tries to cure his grandson’s stuttering by offering him money. A grandmother explains to her grandchildren the roles servants and “darkies” play in the world. The values of responsibility, tradition, and concern for the family are passed down from generation to generation.

Several of the scenes occur in the not-too-distant future, what must have been intended as the mid-1980’s. The United States in this future is a police state in which no one crosses state lines without a travel permit, people out after curfew are subject to questioning, once-safe neighborhoods have been fortified with electrical fences, and young people who are able flee to Canada to begin new lives. Snoozer’s club has had its license revoked because of its resistance activities, and Snoozer himself has been killed under mysterious circumstances, probably by the authorities.

In the final scene, the family that opened the play returns. On the Sunday before Labor Day, in a year during the 1960’s, Mother, Father, Snoozer, his wife Esther, and his sister Sibby and her fiancé Ray walk from the summer house down to the lake after dinner. This year, they comment on the pollution in Lake Erie and remember evenings when they could see fish jumping. Next year, they resolve, they will install a pool so the children can swim.

The family reenacts the annual family ritual: Having collected the summer’s tennis balls, they take turns tossing them into the canoe. The first to toss a ball that stays in the boat wins first choice of dates for use of the house the following summer. Ray appears to win but is disqualified for stepping over a line that only the family can see; Snoozer is the victor. Then the boat, which seems easily repairable to Ray but hopelessly old and decrepit to the others, is doused with kerosene, lit, and set adrift. The group sings sadly, a red glow from the fire visible on their faces, as the boat burns and drifts away. As the song ends, they stand watching, and the glow fades until they are left in darkness at the play’s conclusion.

Dramatic Devices

Scenes from American Life is a picture of an entire social class, not of specific individuals or families, and A. R. Gurney emphasizes this universality through the device of having each of his actors play several parts. In the course of the play’s nearly forty scenes, more than one hundred different characters speak, and several others ad-lib in the background. Gurney’s script calls for a much smaller cast—four men and four women, each appearing in several scenes. To weaken individual identities further, Gurney insists that the roles be distributed so that, for example, an actor playing a father in one scene plays the father in another. The only repeating characters are Snoozer’s father and mother, who are played by the same actors in the play’s first and last scenes.

Gurney uses set and costume to advance his message that his view of WASP society is not limited to specific people or times. His prescribed set is a stark and simple one, with no drawing-room walls or background landscapes that might become familiar and seem to refer to specific places. Instead, a nearly bare stage with different levels or focal points, and simple chairs or other props carried in and out by the actors, enable the setting to shift quickly from a living room to a church to a car to a ski lift, smoothly and without interruption for set changes. The play covers many people and many moments, and each individual scene must flow smoothly into the next so that the audience will not have a chance to consider any one moment at length.

Similarly, the actors wear simple costumes, with nothing to distinguish one from another. Accessories and props are used to help place a scene in a particular time, but for all intents and purposes the costumes help make the actors absolutely interchangeable.

The only indispensable object in a production of Scenes from American Life is the piano that remains prominently in the center of the stage throughout the play. The pianist playing a medley of tunes is the first thing the audience sees and hears as the play begins, and the last thing it sees at the end. In between, the pianist plays music that places each scene in its proper time period and also helps set the tone for the action. In the first scene, for example, the pianist plays “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” as the christening party begins, a fanfare to celebrate the gift of a large check, and “Rockabye Baby” to accompany the singing guests as the scene ends.

Often the music adds a note of satiric gaiety when the dialogue turns serious, or of patriotic sentiment when the characters demonstrate their misplaced concerns, or of pomposity and solemnity as a minister condones selfishness. The piano is used, then, to mark a change in scene abruptly, and often to undercut what the characters are saying. The pianist, unifier and evaluator of all that occurs onstage, is the only performer who maintains the same role throughout the play.

Critical Context

Scenes from American Life is one play among several in which A. R. Gurney takes a satirical look at upper-middle-class WASP society. It was his first full-length play, and the first to be taken seriously by critics. Many of his earlier, shorter works, most notably The David Show (pr. 1966, pb. 1968) and The Golden Fleece (pb. 1967, pr. 1968), also use humor and satire to expose the banalities of modern life in the United States.

Scenes from American Life shows the tensions within families in several scenes; this is a theme to which Gurney has returned throughout his career. Children (pr., pb. 1974), an adaptation of a short story by John Cheever (with whose work that of Gurney has often been compared), follows one WASP family through a long weekend, presenting an image of upper-middle-class society that is less satirical but no less critical than that presented in Scenes from American Life.

Gurney’s fascination with unusual staging devices has stayed with him, as has the theme of the decline and fall of elitist society. The Dining Room (pr., pb. 1982) presents a series of vignettes occurring over three generations in one family dining room, again with a small cast playing multiple roles. Sweet Sue (pr. 1986, pb. 1987) has each character played by two actors, echoing the breaking down of individual personality with which Gurney experimented in Scenes from American Life. The Perfect Party (pr. 1985) uses qualities of the farce to tell the story of a professor trying to be the perfect host, within one of Gurney’s recurring settings: academia. His plays of the 1990’s include The Old Boy (pr. 1991, pb. 1992), Later Life (pr. 1993, pb. 1994), Sylvia (pr. 1995, pb. 1996), Far East (pr. 1998, pb. 1999), and Ancestral Voices (pr. 1999, pb. 2000).

With more than three dozen plays, musicals, script adaptations, and novels, Gurney has established a reputation as the chronicler of a society passing into extinction. In 1986, he asserted to an interviewer that he did not “have too much more to say about the subject.” Whatever other directions his work takes, he remains an important critic of American WASP society—important because he has written of its fallen idols with affection and wit.

Sources for Further Study

Barnes, Clive. “Scenes from American Life at the Forum.” New York Times, March 26, 1971, p. 33.

Gottfried, Martin. Review in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews 32 (June 13, 1971): 271.

Gurney, A. R., Jr. “The Dinner Party.” American Heritage 39 (September/October, 1988): 69-71.

Hughes, Catharine. “New York.” Plays and Players 18 (June, 1971): 30-32.

Oliver, Edith. Review in The New Yorker, April 3, 1971, 95-97.

Strachen, Alan. “A. R. Gurney.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.