About the Play:

Ancestral Voices is a full-length drama by A.R. Gurney. Set just before and into the World War II years, Ancestral Voices focuses on the grandparents, parents, and son of a wealthy Buffalo, New York family. Beginning with the perspective of an 8 year old, then as a teenager, and finally as a grown man, the son narrates a tale of upheaval when his grandmother leaves his grandfather for another man.

Ancestral Voices is set in playwright A.R. Gurney's hometown of Buffalo, New York in the 1940s. It is a bittersweet story, perceived through the eyes of young Eddie, whose family is turned inside out when his grandmother unexpectedly divorces his grandfather in order to marry his grandfather's best friend. Simultaneously, the outside world is undergoing temporal changes and we follow the family through the ensuing decades of war and social upheaval. Returning to the concept of a play to be read rather than fully staged, which A.R. Gurney employed in Love Letters, Ancestral Voices was written to be performed informally: five actors sit on stage and read the script, making it easy to have rotating casts.

Ancestral Voices premiered in 1999 at at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theatre in New York City. The West Coast premiere was in 2000 at The Falcon Theatre (now Garry Marshall Theatre) in Burbank, California. It's been a popular and a favourite play for regional and community theatre productions ever since.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"If the family is the key theme of American drama, A.R. Gurney's Ancestral Voices: a family story is a beautiful chamber work in that great tradition. The short play is staged as a concert work, with five performers sitting on chairs in front of music stands, where they've laid their scripts. The five are playing members — grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, son — of a rich WASP family in Buffalo NY between 1935 and 1942, with a brief coda from the 1960s. The son, Eddie, who goes from age eight to twelve, is our narrator, guide and point of view.... This lovely play unites the microcosm of family to the macrocosm of America at war. On Eddie's first date he brings his girl a paper `war-sage'. It's also about something in between — a city. It's an elegy for Buffalo, a once-glorious place whose fortunes are declining. The texture of life in Buffalo is heartbreakingly evoked in ways reminiscent of The Magnificent Ambersons.... This is a magical play, not a mere exercise in uncritical nostalgia, but a nuanced reminiscence full of time and change and loss and suffering — as well as joy." — New York Post

"...A.R. Gurney's genteel and gently comic Ancestral Voices...leaving exceedingly pleasant memories in its wake. Mr Gurney's play is performed in the manner of his popular epistolary drama Love Letters, with the cast reading from scripts while seated on a bare stage.... The hybrid Mr Gurney has produced is as elegantly faceted as a marquise diamond. What distinguishes the tales is the rueful maturity with which it is recounted by a man gazing back over the decades. The characters feel like fully fleshed-out cousins of the denizens of the novels of John Cheever, to whom the dramatist is often compared. The production is not dramatic in the strictest sense, either; the flare-ups in this confrontation-averse clan flicker only for instants. Yet isn't that the way a lot of families let off steam?" — The New York Times

"...with Ancestral Voices, the result is a wistful, colorful companion piece to Love Letters. That two-character epistolary goldmine, of course, has been similarly read on stages, cruise ships and wherever pairs of actors hunger for quick-study, quality work. Given the new one's larger cast requirements, it is not likely to duplicate the phenomenal popularity of its predecessor. The story of unraveling expectations in a society that considered itself a constant, however, is no less captivating a human document of recent but very foreign times." — Newsday

About the Playwright:

A.R. Gurney (1930-2017) is known as one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in America. His work focuses primarily on the issues and realities of middle-class American life and has been produced on international theatre stages for more than 50 years. He is also the author of three novels and a two-time Pulitzer Prize for Drama nominee, the recipient of the Drama Desk Award, and the Award of Merit from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.