Chinue blog

A.R. Gurney's play 'Black Tie' is well tailored

NEW YORK – Sometimes, your dad's old hand-me-down suits need altering to fit just right. Sometimes, his advice does, too.

Such is the premise of A.R. Gurney's very enjoyable new play "Black Tie," which made its world premiere at Primary Stages' 59E59 Theaters on Thursday night. A comedy about how values change from generation to generation, the play benefits from some excellent acting and writing.

It takes place on the eve of a wedding in a hotel in the Adirondacks. The groom's family has arrived to prepare for the rehearsal dinner downstairs and the father, Curtis (a fine Gregg Edelman), is slipping on his late father's tuxedo, which he has had tailored for the occasion to honor tradition.

That's when a familiar spirit appears: It's Curtis' charming father, who has been aroused from The Great Beyond by his loving son to help write his wedding speech and for advice. Dressed in an impeccable tuxedo of his own, the silver-haired father cannot be seen or heard by anyone but Curtis.

The father, played deliciously by Daniel Davis, is hardly mute: He's a font of old-school elegance, quipping relentlessly, advising on the "proper" way things should be and liberally quoting from Joseph Conrad and Lord Byron.

He believes in continuity, in dinner jackets, that "pants" should be called "trousers." When he says he's "very fond" of someone, he really means the opposite. And he's revealed to be a snob, as when he discovers the bride's father manages a supermarket in Utica, an upstate New York city that is far from glamorous.

"Do we know anyone in Utica?" he asks Curtis.

"I don't know, Dad," Curtis answers.

"I'm not sure we do. I'm not sure we should," he replies.

Curtis' preparations for the rehearsal dinner do not go smoothly. His wife (a delightfully flinty Carolyn McCormick, of "Law & Order" fame), never really much liked Curtis' dad and thinks the old tuxedo makes him overdressed. The two lovingly bicker like a comfortable married couple.

More bad news: Their daughter (Elvy Yost) soon reports that the youthful guests are messing with the carefully constructed seating arrangements and that an unwanted guest has arrived. And the groom himself (Ari Brand) is having second thoughts. Plus, the bride's parents may resent the WASPy-ness of the groom's parents. Even the decision to wear black tie may be sending the wrong message.

Curtis — and especially his ghostly father — have a hard time with each new revelation. Davis, who played the butler Niles in "The Nanny," does a superb job of slowly unspooling his character's horror at modern life: unembarrassed divorcees, interracial marriages, the lost art of sparkling after-dinner speeches and, perhaps most shockingly, wedding receptions held in a place as tacky as the hotel's Ticonderoga Room.

"Life is a long, incoherent, ungrammatical sentence, and all I can do is try to provide some basic punctuation," the ghost says at one point, in one of Gurney's best lines.

Director Mark Lamos has handled several of Gurney's plays and keeps the rhythm of the new one at a happy pace, juggling five characters who pop in and out — including an apparition, who, naturally, knows how to make a grand exit when the time is right.

As for "Black Tie," the makings of a very sad commentary on life actually ends up fine in the end: Some of the old ways may not work now, but some of the new ways lack a certain pizazz. Gurney has tailored a fine piece of work to joke about both.

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