Review: Gurney's Quietly Poignant LATER LIFE Opens Portland Stage Season

Portland Stage opens its 2016-2017 season with a quietly poignant production of A. R. Gurney's Later Life, the 1993 drama which explores the emotional choices and self-assessments that face people in their retirement years. The four-character piece is subdued, even reticent, and it speaks with the kind of understated wistfulness of so many of Gurney's plays.

Writing as he loves to do about the privileged WASP culture, Later Life contains many autobiographical elements with its protagonist Austin a reflection of the playwright's own history as a naval officer, his elitist upbringing and marriage, and his choice only late in life to become a dramatist. Gurney's skill lies in his tacit understanding of his characters, their often-concealed feelings and their social codes and contexts. And so Later Life raises some interesting issues about missed opportunities, second chances, and hopelessly confining social and psychological barriers. Some of his dialogue, however, feels contrived, lacking the underlying tension and acerbic wit of characters in plays like The Cocktail Hour. Perhaps, Gurney's best characterizations are of the several other men and women who pop in and out of Austin and Ruth's tête à tête at the posh party - quirky, amusing, daft individuals who, despite their oddness, retain a genuineness of feeling that Austin lacks.

Cecil McKinnon directs with a deft touch, for the most part staying out of the way of the script and letting the characters speak for themselves. The décor and costumes by Anita Stewart are lovely to look at - a sweeping panorama of Boston Harbor from the terrace of a posh brownstone - and transport the viewer into the reality of this Brahmin life style. Jason Fok's lighting design is a major factor in conveying the passage of time in the play, subtly shifting from cocktail hour to the twinkling lights of the dark cityscape, as the characters struggle against time to make a choice. Travis Joseph Wright contributes the equally subtle sound design with wafting voices and tinkling piano music setting the backdrop.

John Hadden plays Austin with the requisite bland charm making him as sympathetic as the script permits. Rae C. Wright endows Ruth with the right blend of forthrightness and yearning - a woman poking a toe into the water to test it but ultimately not taking the plunge. The strongest acting challenges go to Ron Botting and Kate Udall who portray the other male and female characters respectively. Botting has the juiciest pars to limn with his zany unreformed smoker mourning his lost partner, his nerdy computer geek, his golf-obsessed retiree, his gushy Southern romantic, and Austin's wise old friend, and he executes each of these with flair. Udall complements him with an urbane and worldly-wise hostess Sally, a yenta-like longsuffering grandmother, a colorful Southern belle, and an eccentric but loyal friend Judith. Perhaps it is because these characters, for all their oddities, get the best, most truthful lines to speak, that they compel our sympathies the most.

Later Life offers a subtle start to a season which Executive/Artistic Director Anita Stewart says will be dedicated to exploring "the themes of Marriage, love, and family."

Photographs courtesy of Portland Stage

Later Life runs from September 27-October 23 at Portland Stage, 25 Forest Ave., Portland, ME 207-774-0465 www.portlandstage.or

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