A. R. Gurney Jr. has a wonderful name for the kind of work he does, an unmistakably American name from its initials to its "Jr." What Gurney does is write the most thoroughly American middlebrow plays of any of our dramatists; if "middlebrow" is too strong a word, I'll call him the poet laureate of middle-consciousness.

I use that term to indicate both that his plays fall in the center of the technical and thematic spectrums of American drama and that they never rise much above a modest level of wit and perceptiveness, or ever fall much below it. Moreover, in a theater increasingly dominated by writers from minority religious and ethnic backgrounds, Gurney speaks for, or to, or with the voice of what is still our largest population bloc. Gurney is a WASP—he has rather excessively been called the John Cheever of the theater—who celebrates...