ABSTRACT
Gurney’s youth in Buffalo, New York, focused his attention on ideas that concern him today. Foremost are the twins, fairness and responsibility. As he recalls his early life, Gurney sees that his awareness of these ideas came, in part, through rituals of family life. His mother’s family and his father’s family arrived in Buffalo in the 1850s and succeeding generations remained there pursuing careers as attorneys, real estate brokers, and merchants. By Gurney’s birth in 1930, the long strands of the family circle had braided intricately. Some family rituals seem simple and ordinary. The evening meal, for example, always three courses long, anchored each day in Gurney’s home.1 Sunday and holiday visits to his grandmothers’ houses knitted together the extended Gurney relations. And even though the divorce and remarriage of his maternal grandmother, Marian Perkins Spaulding, disturbed and complicated these rituals, they were not disrupted. Rather the rituals accommodated the new order of relations as you can see in Gurney’s play Ancestral Voices. That experience-of the social fabric stretching and containing the strongest emotionsshapes Gurney’s thinking about his art.
