ABSTRACT
A.R.Gurney has made it abundantly clear in the presentation of six of his plays from the eighties that he wants them to be seen as self-consciously metatheatrical, or, as he prefers to put it, self-reflexive. His introduction to the volume containing Love Letters, The Golden Age, and What I Did Last Summer begins: “These are three plays about writing.”1 To be even more precise, he explains further on that “all three plays have to do with men who use writing as a mode of self-liberation, and their relationships with women who seem to be able to embrace a freer, more spirited life on their own” (xi). Asked about the yet-to-be-produced Cocktail Hour in a 1988 interview, he commented:
The conflict is about a man in his early middle years who comes home to his city to ask his parents’ permission to stage a play he has written. He is sensitive enough to want to ask his parents. But they won’t even read it. The idea of being made public is not to their liking. The name of the writer’s play is “The Cocktail Hour” It’s very self-reflexive.2
