Bonus Weekend Podcast: A.R. Gurney and Horton Foote

A.R. (aka “Pete”) Gurney may have made a name for himself at first with his plays, “The Dining Room” and “The Cocktail Hour,” but over his long career, he continued to mine his white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background in increasingly inventive and moving ways. “Sylvia,” for instance, was a comedy about an unconventional middle-aged man from the Upper West Side, who loves a dog he found in Central Park. And “Love Letters,” which features only 2 actors, continues to be revived across the country. Gurney’s hometown of Buffalo was a recurrent source of inspiration. He just died at the age of 86. You can hear our conversation with him from 2006. And we’re adding an interview we had with Horton Foote, another incredible playwright whose native Texas would feature in his work again and again.