About the Play:

Family Furniture is a full-length drama by A.R. Gurney. No one familiar with A.R. Gurney will be surprised that Family Furniture is set near Buffalo, New York, or that four of the five characters are white Anglo-Saxon Episcopalians. Those things, though, are about all that's predictable in A.R. Gurney's heartfelt tale about parents and children.

Family Furniture takes a look at the silent ways we cope with one another. The scene is 1950s Buffalo, near the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Amid the gin and tonics, vichyssoise, and tennis doubles with the Baldwins, siblings Nick and Peggy must confront their mother Claire's possible infidelity, their father Russell's apparent indifference, and their own increasingly complicated love lives. Family Furniture is a coming-of-age-tale about a family and one certain summer when everything shifts.

Family Furniture premiered in 2013 at The Flea Theater off-off-Broadway in the TriBeCa section of New York City. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Family Furniture is a period piece set in the early 1950s, a time of luncheon clubs, Studebakers and casual bigotry, but there is nothing dated about the emotions portrayed therein, and nothing in any way rusty about the self-assured craftsmanship with which Mr. Gurney puts them onstage. He is an American master, one of the best playwrights that we have, and in Family Furniture he shows us that his mastery, against all odds, is continuing to deepen…Plays like Family Furniture used to open on Broadway. This one belongs there." — Wall Street Journal

"…a tender, sepia-toned play about a traumatic passage in the lives of a tight-knit, well-bred clan [as a] sense of dangerous change seems to hang threateningly in the atmosphere, like a thunderstorm that just won't burst… [Gurney] expresses a graceful respect for all his characters, who are drawn with his customary gentle humor and sympathy." — The New York Times

"It's an old-fashioned, 1950s-set gin-on-the-rocks drama, and it's a pure delight." — Entertainment Weekly

"This is a Darwinian lesson for the modern, civilized world, in which keeping up appearances is a more useful survival mechanism than honesty… It's this unseen churning under a placid surface that gives this subtle play its tension." — TheaterMania.com

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.