26
Aug/15

LOVE & MONEY

26
Aug/15
(photo © 2015 Joan Marcus)

Cornelia Cunningham (Maureen Anderman) reads a surprising letter in A. R. Gurney’s LOVE & MONEY (photo © 2015 Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 28, $25-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

A. R. (Pete) Gurney says farewell to WASP culture in the disappointing Love & Money, the third and final work in his Signature Theatre residency that began with revivals of The Wayside Motor Inn and What I Did Last Summer. The octogenarian Gurney, whose Love Letters had an unfortunately abbreviated run on Broadway last year and whose Sylvia is coming to the Great White Way this fall, visits familiar territory in the ever-so-slight Love & Money, a drab seventy-five-minute look into wealth, legacy, and the irrelevance of the Social Register. Gurney veteran Maureen Anderman (Ancestral Voices, Later Life) stars as Cornelia Cunningham, an erudite aging woman who has decided to donate the majority of her impressive fortune to various charities, which does not make her grandchildren very happy, nor her lawyer, Harvey Abel (Joe Paulik), a stuffed shirt with no sense of humor. “And your specialty is difficult old ladies?” Cornelia asks. “My specialty is Trusts and Estates,” he says, to which she responds, “I once knew a lawyer whose specialty was Murders and Impositions.” Harvey has come to Cornelia’s swanky Upper East Side brownstone to warn Cornelia that a man is falsely claiming to be the love child of her late daughter and is after her money, but when Walker “Scott” Williams (Gabriel Brown) arrives, he instantly charms Cornelia with his detailed story as he attempts to worm his way into her life. The “Is he or isn’t he” plot line is straight out of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, and just because Gurney refences that play in this one, that’s no excuse him for treading on old ground. He also adds a peripheral character, Juilliard student Jessica Worth (Kahyun Kim), as a forced way to inject some Cole Porter tunes into the play, as well as a love interest for Scott that strains credulity. It all leads to a grand finale that is surprisingly amateurish for such a well-respected playwright, a silly love letter to the theater that falls completely flat.

(photo © 2015 Joan Marcus)

Jessica (Kahyun Kim) and Cornelia (Maureen Anderman) have fun with a player piano in new A. R. Gurney play at the Signature (photo © 2015 Joan Marcus)

Longtime Gurney director Mark Lamos (Our Country’s Good, Seascape) does what he can with the musty tale, and Anderman is wonderfully classy in a role she clearly enjoys playing, an engaging woman who declares, “I’ve committed the major crime of having too much money.” Pamela Dunlap (Yerma, The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940) adds some humor as Cornelia’s astute, cynical maid, and Michael Yeargan’s library set is lovely, but Brown (The Mystery of Love & Sex, The City of Conversation) overdoes the smarm as the ambitious Scott, who is looking to break out of his mundane life. Gurney pays tribute to his hometown of Buffalo, name-checks his earlier hits The Cocktail Hour and The Dining Room, shares his thoughts on Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and injects too much Porter as he points out again and again that money can be a curse and that WASP culture is dying. But as Cornelia repeatedly says, “Whatevah.”