Sylvia In Praise of a Dog’s Life
From the 1996-97 Season of the Portland Stage Company.
By Martin Andrucki
A talking dog with the soul of a beautiful young woman is lost in the wilderness. A desolate man, searching for meaning in life, finds her and carries her home. Through the dog’s miraculous powers the man is brought into contact with the healing forces of nature, and as a result undergoes a spiritual transformation and rebirth. All of which occurs in a play named Sylvia, which means, as the redeemed protagonist tells us, “she of the woods.”
Name that author.
Some ancient fabulist like Ovid, or Apuleius perhaps? Maybe a later figure of similar outlook and Latin background: the Italian, Carlo Gozzi; the Frenchman, Jean Giraudoux? Or, to spin the globe a bit, how about a kabuki or bunraku master? Some romantic figure, surely, who deals in the exotic currencies of myth and magic?
Hardly. The author of this tale of transfiguration and redemption is none other than A.R. Gurney, native son of Buffalo, graduate of St. Paul’s School and Williams College, a playwright best known in the words of British critic Benedict Nightingale, as “the bard of the fingerbowl classes, the chronicler of a dying WASP culture.”
What Nightingale has in mind with this description is something like Scenes from American Life (1970), Gurney’s first full-length play. At one moment in this panoramic view of upper-middle-class America, a businessman dictates a letter to his alma mater:
[S]orry, but this year I don’t think I’ll cough up another nickel for Yale. I’m distressed that the library was burned but why should I keep Yale up when even its own students persist in dragging her down. (Gets angrier)... I’m getting tired of supporting all those things that maybe ought to collapse. Sometimes all I think I am is an old jock strap, holding up the… whole goddam world!
Throughout this tiade the man’s secretary has been eyeing him anxiously, taken aback by his unaccustomed vehemence. Finally, noticing both his own anger and his secretary’s discomfort, he pulls himself together:
Strike that, Miss Johnson. Obviously. And excuse me. (Pause) Strike out the whole letter, Miss Johnson. (Pause) Begin again. (With a sigh) Dear Brad. Enclosed is my annual check for Yale. I wish it could be larger...
This might be the quintessential Gurney moment, pre-Sylvia. Take the character: an archetypal WASP, mid-century vintage. He is well-bred, well-heeled, and well-intentioned. Take the situation: the old grad is steamed about how things are going downhill, not just at Yale, but in the “whole goddam world.” Take the outcome: embarrassed by his own passion, the Yalie stifles himself and does the right thing.
Variations on this moment are replayed time and again in such later works by Gurney as The Middle Ages (1977), The Dining Room (1982), Love Letters (1988), and The Cocktail Hour (1988). In this latter, for example, John the well-bred son of upper-middle-class parents, confronts his father with the manuscript of a play he has written exposing the shadowy side of his family’s privileged life. After a brief angry exchange, father and son apologize to one another, and John agrees to put his play on the shelf until his parents are dead. Once again, good form prevails over passion in Gurney’s wold of self-denying WASPS, a world drained of miracle or mystery in which the price of privilege is paid in the currency of duties performed and emotions repressed.
Until we come to Sylvia. Written after the dramatist and his wife had finished raising their children and moved from the suburbs to New York City, the play explores the possibilities of life beyond the constraints of domestic obligation and social duty.
But not too far beyond. The protagonist, Greg, alters his existence not by divorcing his wife, or taking a lover, or changing his sexual orientation, or even by buying a motorcycle -- all talk-show cliches of mid-life rebellion. Instead, he confronts the forces of advancing age and encroaching death by committing existential defiance Gurney-style: he gets himself a dog. A small gesture, but a bold one -- and therefore a landmark event in Gurney’s world. For once, a buttoned-up WASP loosens his tie and runs, moderately, amok.
But why is acquiring a dog such an audacious act for Greg? After all, well-bred fellows like him have been piling golden retrievers into Volvos for generations, without a trace of social subversion. For Greg however, Sylvia is not just another emblem of his class. She is a cosmic experience. Greg finds Sylvia in Central Park while playing hooky from a job he has come to hate for being “too abstract,” too remote from tangible facts of life. Sylvia on the other hand, a whirlwind of bounding, barking exuberance, becomes for Greg an embodiment of the reality so painfully absent elsewhere in his life. Not only is she the opposite of his abstract job, but she offers a thrilling alternative to the whole prosaic world of family obligation and middle-class propriety. And she is literate too, citing The Odyssey at one passionate moment in defense of canine loyalty.
And so Greg heads off into the unknown with Sylvia: “these walks at night are giving me a whole new perspective on life,” he tells her. Eventually he abandons his day job to venture deeper into the dark with Sylvia, and he begins to ponder -- a trifle foolishly, perhaps -- the deepest questions: “Maybe that vast book of nature spread open above us is trying to tell us things we once knew and have forgotten… All I know is you trigger instincts in me, Sylvia. You take me back in some basic way.”
Needless to say, Greg’s spiritual quest provokes anxiety at home, where Kate, his wife, looks with dismay on her husband’s deteriorating relations with his boss, with disbelief at their children's’ unpaid tuition bills, and with loathing at Sylvia’s dog hair spread all over the couch. And just as Kate is beginning to develop a serious career of her own, Greg seems, in the words of their therapist, “to have retreated into a kind of pastoral nostalgia.”
The seeds of a typical Gurney crisis are thus carefully planted: will Greg do the right thing and go back to his job in the currency market? Or will he follow those nocturnal instincts aroused by the arrival of Sylvia, and continue his walks on the wild side? In a play in which a dog can quote from The Odyssey, we should expect a surprising answer.
From the 1996-97 Season of the Portland Stage Company.
By Martin Andrucki
A talking dog with the soul of a beautiful young woman is lost in the wilderness. A desolate man, searching for meaning in life, finds her and carries her home. Through the dog’s miraculous powers the man is brought into contact with the healing forces of nature, and as a result undergoes a spiritual transformation and rebirth. All of which occurs in a play named Sylvia, which means, as the redeemed protagonist tells us, “she of the woods.”
Name that author.
Some ancient fabulist like Ovid, or Apuleius perhaps? Maybe a later figure of similar outlook and Latin background: the Italian, Carlo Gozzi; the Frenchman, Jean Giraudoux? Or, to spin the globe a bit, how about a kabuki or bunraku master? Some romantic figure, surely, who deals in the exotic currencies of myth and magic?
Hardly. The author of this tale of transfiguration and redemption is none other than A.R. Gurney, native son of Buffalo, graduate of St. Paul’s School and Williams College, a playwright best known in the words of British critic Benedict Nightingale, as “the bard of the fingerbowl classes, the chronicler of a dying WASP culture.”
What Nightingale has in mind with this description is something like Scenes from American Life (1970), Gurney’s first full-length play. At one moment in this panoramic view of upper-middle-class America, a businessman dictates a letter to his alma mater:
[S]orry, but this year I don’t think I’ll cough up another nickel for Yale. I’m distressed that the library was burned but why should I keep Yale up when even its own students persist in dragging her down. (Gets angrier)... I’m getting tired of supporting all those things that maybe ought to collapse. Sometimes all I think I am is an old jock strap, holding up the… whole goddam world!
Throughout this tiade the man’s secretary has been eyeing him anxiously, taken aback by his unaccustomed vehemence. Finally, noticing both his own anger and his secretary’s discomfort, he pulls himself together:
Strike that, Miss Johnson. Obviously. And excuse me. (Pause) Strike out the whole letter, Miss Johnson. (Pause) Begin again. (With a sigh) Dear Brad. Enclosed is my annual check for Yale. I wish it could be larger...
This might be the quintessential Gurney moment, pre-Sylvia. Take the character: an archetypal WASP, mid-century vintage. He is well-bred, well-heeled, and well-intentioned. Take the situation: the old grad is steamed about how things are going downhill, not just at Yale, but in the “whole goddam world.” Take the outcome: embarrassed by his own passion, the Yalie stifles himself and does the right thing.
Variations on this moment are replayed time and again in such later works by Gurney as The Middle Ages (1977), The Dining Room (1982), Love Letters (1988), and The Cocktail Hour (1988). In this latter, for example, John the well-bred son of upper-middle-class parents, confronts his father with the manuscript of a play he has written exposing the shadowy side of his family’s privileged life. After a brief angry exchange, father and son apologize to one another, and John agrees to put his play on the shelf until his parents are dead. Once again, good form prevails over passion in Gurney’s wold of self-denying WASPS, a world drained of miracle or mystery in which the price of privilege is paid in the currency of duties performed and emotions repressed.
Until we come to Sylvia. Written after the dramatist and his wife had finished raising their children and moved from the suburbs to New York City, the play explores the possibilities of life beyond the constraints of domestic obligation and social duty.
But not too far beyond. The protagonist, Greg, alters his existence not by divorcing his wife, or taking a lover, or changing his sexual orientation, or even by buying a motorcycle -- all talk-show cliches of mid-life rebellion. Instead, he confronts the forces of advancing age and encroaching death by committing existential defiance Gurney-style: he gets himself a dog. A small gesture, but a bold one -- and therefore a landmark event in Gurney’s world. For once, a buttoned-up WASP loosens his tie and runs, moderately, amok.
But why is acquiring a dog such an audacious act for Greg? After all, well-bred fellows like him have been piling golden retrievers into Volvos for generations, without a trace of social subversion. For Greg however, Sylvia is not just another emblem of his class. She is a cosmic experience. Greg finds Sylvia in Central Park while playing hooky from a job he has come to hate for being “too abstract,” too remote from tangible facts of life. Sylvia on the other hand, a whirlwind of bounding, barking exuberance, becomes for Greg an embodiment of the reality so painfully absent elsewhere in his life. Not only is she the opposite of his abstract job, but she offers a thrilling alternative to the whole prosaic world of family obligation and middle-class propriety. And she is literate too, citing The Odyssey at one passionate moment in defense of canine loyalty.
And so Greg heads off into the unknown with Sylvia: “these walks at night are giving me a whole new perspective on life,” he tells her. Eventually he abandons his day job to venture deeper into the dark with Sylvia, and he begins to ponder -- a trifle foolishly, perhaps -- the deepest questions: “Maybe that vast book of nature spread open above us is trying to tell us things we once knew and have forgotten… All I know is you trigger instincts in me, Sylvia. You take me back in some basic way.”
Needless to say, Greg’s spiritual quest provokes anxiety at home, where Kate, his wife, looks with dismay on her husband’s deteriorating relations with his boss, with disbelief at their children's’ unpaid tuition bills, and with loathing at Sylvia’s dog hair spread all over the couch. And just as Kate is beginning to develop a serious career of her own, Greg seems, in the words of their therapist, “to have retreated into a kind of pastoral nostalgia.”
The seeds of a typical Gurney crisis are thus carefully planted: will Greg do the right thing and go back to his job in the currency market? Or will he follow those nocturnal instincts aroused by the arrival of Sylvia, and continue his walks on the wild side? In a play in which a dog can quote from The Odyssey, we should expect a surprising answer.