AR Gurney seems to have been the master of plays that I love before I knew I loved them (or him.) He always writes small-scale conflicts, very personal and intimate. If his characters were to be erased from existence, little about their world would change, but, like Our Town, there is beauty in their ordinary lives.

Well, not entirely ordinary, in Gurney’s case, as his plays tend to be about people wealthy enough to be leisurely, though not important enough to be notable. In Children, which is the earliest play I’ve read by him so far, he explores a family over a July 4th weekend. Mother, as she is known, is hosting her two eldest children, when they find out the youngest brother, whom they haven’t seen since their father’s death five years previous, is suddenly coming up as well.

Although credited as an actor in the production, the younger brother never makes a full appearance on stage, holding some brilliant tension as we expect him to barge on at any moment and show us this titan who has been stymying everyone since the day he was born.

Pokey (the youngest)’s sudden arrival is brought on by the fact that their mother will soon remarry a family friend, and according to the dictates of the will, this house will pass on to the three children. Barbara and Randy have designs of their own which they quickly begin scheming on, even as their mother frets about making a perfect weekend now that she gets to see Pokey again.

In all of his play AR Gurney seems to ask “what is the value of the orderly Status Quo”? and in Children he turns his eye towards the family. Why should Mother work to appease Pokey, who seems to care little for the comfort of his family, why should Barbara and Randy hold onto the view of life their father and mother wanted them to have, why should Pokey raise his children in the same stilted manner as Barbara and Randy raise theirs?"

By the end Gurney arrives at what he will later explore in The Middle Ages: comfort is stultifying, but if you reach outside of it you will be exiled for your curiosity. As Mother reveals in her final monologue Pokey is the only one of her children who ever tried to grow up, but in doing so he has stepped outside the bounds of how she knows how to love him, and so the family has to be separated, while the status quo has to be kept for Barbara and Randy, who are happy in their confinement.