Mrs Farnsworth

The very proper, well educated Connecticut wife and mother Margery Farnsworth signs up for a writing course with the intent of penning a tell-all book about our current President, with whom she has shared a shady past. Instructor Gordon Bell is all too happy to help Mrs Farnsworth get the truth out. In swoops her husband, Forrest Farnsworth, who with beguiling charm and tender passion for his wife presents quite a different view of their collected history and politics. A R Gurney exquisitely captures Mr and Mrs Farnsworth, and once again presents the fading WASP way of life with humor and compassion.

"Politicians poised to sling mud might take a pointer or two from A R Gurney: Good manners can be lethal weapons, and a glancing sideswipe may cause more damage than a punch in the nose. An expert demonstration of such tactics is on … in Mr Gurney's disarming new play, MRS FARNSWORTH … Though it deals with revelations that are the stuff of smear campaigns, MRS FARNSWORTH is as polite and sweetly subversive a political attack as you're likely ever to come across. Like Tim Robbins's EMBEDDED currently at the Public Theater, MRS FARNSWORTH takes aim at the sitting president of the United States. But whereas Mr Robbins's series of satiric sketches registers as a loud and angry a scream, Mr Gurney's latest offering feels as if it's spoken out of the side of the mouth, sotto voce through a firmly locked jaw. Well, jaws would be locked, as this is Gurney country, land of the endangered species called WASP … fine specimens of this breed: wealthy, inhibited folk who wear their sense of entitlement with sheepishness and smugness. They're people you might run across at a Bush fund-raiser. Mr Bush, however, would be woefully mistaken to perceive them as allies … MRS FARNSWORTH is set in a creative-writing class in Manhattan, run by a sardonic, harried teacher named Gordon. Class is under way when a resplendently well-groomed student makes a late and incongruous entrance, like a rara avis in an urban pigeon coop. That's the pastel-clad Marjorie Farnsworth, fresh from the Connecticut suburbs and fluttering with apologies. It seems she wants to learn to write because she has a story that urgently needs to be told. It's the tale of a Vassar girl who becomes pregnant by a hard-partying Yale boy, who then pays her (by proxy) to have an abortion. Mrs Farnsworth's narrative starts to sound like a memoir in which only the names have been changed. Could be the boy in question be the young George W Bush? The left-leaning Gordon is atremble with excitement. Despite surface evidence, Mrs Farnsworth is a registered Democrat, deeply concerned about the state of the nation and keen on making her tale public. There is, however, one serious problem, she says: her disapproving husband. Enter Mr Farnsworth, with the contained apprehension and curiosity of a Victorian explorer in darkest Africa. It wouldn't be cricket, as the Farnsworths might put it, to divulge more. Though MRS FARNSWORTH is essentially a debate play, there is nothing dry about it and little that's predictable. This despite Mr and Mrs Farnsworth's being utterly true to their high WASP form, with all the expected geographical references (Fisher's Island, Greenwich) and locutions ('Pardon my French') … Mr and Mrs Farnsworth may be prisoners of their class and its superficial trappings. But like the central figures in Mr Gurney's COCKTAIL HOUR and LATER LIFE, they harbor doubts and conflict beneath their decorous surfaces." —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

A.R. Gurney's plays include The Dining Room, The Middle Ages, The Golden Age, Love Letters, and Silvia. He has received awards from the Drama Desk, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Connecticut and New York City.