The Middle Ages (A.R. Gurney)
I’ve spent time recently thinking about what really draws me into a play so that I can focus my writing in that direction. What was eventually left when I started chipping away at the plays I consider my favorites, is that at the end of the day what I really want are personal-stakes comedies: where there are a few people who aren’t terribly exceptional trying to move through their life and learning something about themselves, and the world, while doing it. A.R. Gurney’s The Middle Ages is that, but it’s also something more, which makes me love it even more than I might otherwise.
Hidden within this decades-spanning story of ill-fated love and a son trying to find his place in a world he wants to rebel against, is a metaphor of America struggling to find what it wants to be: Order or Freedom? Prosperity and Comfort or Passion and Creativity. In the familial story you have Barney, a rambunctious man born uncomfortably into a rich family who wants to be loud and find his own way, in the metaphorical story there is Eleanor who wants to choose to be with Barney but always is pressured to tie herself to his more stable younger brother Billy.
If art allows us to safely experience improper emotions then the love story of Barney and Eleanor is a familiar one: she wants the free-spirited Barney and we want them to be together because despite the fact that we know Barney is ruining his life, embarrassing everyone around him, and squandering his potential we want the two of them to be happy.
But something interesting happens when we hit the 60’s: Barney has been banished from the fancy club where the play takes place and we only get to hear of his exploits from people who have already cast him as a bad seed, and those pranks that he used to pull which were juvenile when he was a teenager and irritating in his 20s sound a lot like political protest as the decade rolls along.
We reconsider whether his father’s dignity at the club was all that worth preserving in the first place. After years of disrupting weddings, ruining Christmases, and being a general nuisance the thing that actually gets Barney exiled from the club is when he lets four black men who gave him a ride swim in the club’s pool as his guests.
The Middle Ages functions as a wonderful small story of Barney trying to get the rich and dignified to accept him as he really is, to earn the respect of his father and the love of Eleanor, and as a bigger story of America in transition: will we let the trappings of comfort make us rigid or will we accept the mess of society and try to do something not everyone will approve of?
It’s a wonderful story that I hope continues to be seen on American stages for many years to come.
