Later Life

       Will love finally bloom for a middle-aged woman and man who met and flirted briefly three decades earlier and now find themselves together again at a party on a terrace overlooking Boston harbor? That is the question that drives A.R. Gurney’s Later Life in the Keen Company’s 25th anniversary production, which opened last night at The Clurman Theatre under the direction of Jonathan Silverstein.

     Ruth (Barbara Garrick) has harbored memories all these years of her evening with Austin (Laurence Lau), a service man on leave in Capri where she was vacationing. They had enjoyed each other’s company, but when she invited him to her room for the night he declined. When they meet again on the terrace, he doesn’t remember her.

          What follows in this wistful little play is moderately involving. Ruth is the more interesting of the two because she is more of a free spirit, or at least as free spirited as a character gets in a Gurney play. Austin is more representative of a Gurney character, a New England WASP, banker, graduate of prestigious private schools who married the boss’s daughter and is now divorced with two grown children.

     All his life, Austin has been convinced that something terrible is going to happen to him. Gurney wrote in an Author’s Note to Later Life that he was inspired by the man in Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” who has a similar fear and so lives his life in such a sheltered way that he finally discovers he hasn’t lived at all, thus fulfilling his prophecy. Austin is not that extreme, but he has lived in a buttoned-down, controlled way.

     Jodie Markell and Liam Craig play a variety of party guests, which Gurney wrote is a way of conveying that we can all take on a variety of roles, even in middle age. I hadn’t picked up on that. I saw it as a casting cost-saving measure, with the characters’ main function seeming to be to interrupt the getting reacquainted process of Ruth and Austin. They come and go on the terrace, which has been romantically designed by Steven Kemp featuring the lights of Boston in the background and a star-filled sky. I gasped in delight when I first saw that set. 

     Austin seems ready for some romance this time around, even though he has gotten used to living alone, which, among the advantages he lists, allows him to fart when he wants. As for whether the two finally become one, you will need to head to Theatre Row before the show’s April 14 closing to find out.