The boilerplate summary of A.
R. Gurney’s latest, Love and Money, goes thus: “Determined to donate
almost everything she owns before her life of grace and privilege ends, wealthy
widow Cornelia Cunningham’s (Maureen Anderman) plan hits a snag when an ambitious and ingratiating young man, Walker
Williams (Gabriel Brown),
arrives to claim his alleged inheritance.” The young man, an African
American, is presumably the love child of an illicit romance between his father
and Cornelia’s deceased daughter. A likewise young lawyer, Harvey Abel (Joe
Paulik), assigned by Cornelia’s firm to
oversee the transactions and protect her, has his antenna up right away, and
seeks to expose what he’s sure is a fraud.
The
play does not represent the gifted Mr. Gurney at his best. The writing and
characterization are polished and thorough, but there is something emotionally
hollow at the core, because you can fairly smell the typing; the cleverness of
the dialogue never finds the sweet spot that also lets you hear it as occurring
naturally; nor does it help that the beats of the play’s developing, slender
story feel manipulated.
Additionally
there’s the playing style, which is kind of oldschool and generic, a bit too
heightened, a bit too pat, like what you might expect of a professional stock
company. You’re never allowed to completely lose yourself in the illusion and
forget you’re watching actors at work. I can’t say this surprised me—in
my limited experience of director Mark Lamos’s work, this seems to be his imprimatur—but because I know him
to be a smart and witty fellow (from some brief professional contact in the mid
‘80s; none since)—I keep hoping he’ll be able to break through to that
extra little touch that moves focused coherency to believable humanity. I
believe I saw it once, when he directed Our Country’s Good by
Timberlake Wertenbaker. Not since. I wonder if a play has to contain some kind
of internal insistence to bring that out of him.
If
so, Love and Money is certainly not that
vehicle. Mr. Lamos plays into Mr. Gurney’s contrivances rather than mitigating
them; and while both men are expert enough to make sure your attention is held
for all 75 intermissionless minutes…there isn’t one of those 75 in which I
believed a word of it.
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