Some plays are too small for the theater, for television, for anything except the author's memory, his heart, and a bureau drawer. Such a one is A. R. Gurney Jr.'s What I Did Last Summer …, an amiable, not unintelligent, intermittently amusing, but finally utterly tepid miniature that only those bursting at the seams with goodwill can clasp to their bosoms or bursting seams.

It is a memory play about the author's fourteenth summer at an aestival colony on the Canadian side of Lake Erie near Buffalo, the site of other Gurneyana. Charlie's father is in the Pacific (the time is 1945); his mother, Grace, is harried and lonely and has had a tiny affair…. Charlie, seeking gainful employment, wanders onto the property of Anna Trumbull, nicknamed the Pig Woman, who is part Indian and semi-out-cast. She is an artist manqué—which, as Bonny explains, is an art teacher...