A wistful air hung over the Upper East Side on the final evening of February, when the last-ever Paris Review party was convened at the longtime East 72nd Street home of its editor, the late George Plimpton. Plimpton’s widow, Sarah, is selling the place and moving to New Mexico. The curtain came down on an era. Perhaps it was ever thus, but the pangs of melancholy are unavoidable when it’s one’s own era that is ending, or even, as in my case, the era just ahead of mine. The day after that party brought the opening of Later Life (at the Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row through April 14), a play by that devoted chronicler of the fading of the wasp aristocracy, A. R. Gurney. Gurney died last year. Any of the veterans on hand at The Paris Review would have agreed with Gurney’s line from the play, “At our age, we are who we are, only more so.”
Though Later Life is not as brilliantly realized as Gurney’s much-produced 1988 classic Love Letters, it is a sagacious contemplation of a disappearing age. The brief (eighty minutes) one-act play is set entirely on the elegantly appointed roof deck of an apartment building overlooking Boston Harbor, with Steven Kemp’s beautiful set recreating the lights of skyscrapers on land and the stars overhead. It’s September of 1993, and the year is pointedly chosen for its end-of-era connotations, the patrician president George H. W. Bush having just been ousted by