THE STORY: John Cheever, master chronicler of America’s post-war angst and alienation, and how it affected a burgeoning suburban class, left a storehouse of dramatic possibilities in his fiction, largely unexplored purely by dint of his chosen artistic medium: prose. In A CHEEVER EVENING, A.R. Gurney brings to light these possibilities through his mastery of stagecraft. Adapting no less than seventeen of Cheever’s most funny and moving of stories, Gurney probes the affairs of that set of people (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who once felt in the majority but soon found themselves in the twilight of their power and at the mercy of a changing world. Seen through the lens of A.R. Gurney’s dramatic sensibility, Cheever’s separate stories of a fragmented and lonely universe combine into a whole and resonant portrait—that of a culture which, while teetering on the brink of extinction, combats loss with humor, wit and feeling.
“Exhilarating! A first rate theatrical piece.” —The New York Times.
“Three cheers for A CHEEVER EVENING! Diverting and marvelously entertaining! Gloriously funny!” —New York Post.
“A marvelous play that captures the wry humor and the underlying melancholy of the author to whom it pays tribute.” —New York Daily News.
