A young wife turns to her husband and says, "Here I am in your mother's outfit, you're in your father's bathrobe, and we're living in your family's house." In A. R. Gurney Jr.'s ["Children"] …, the family—rich, rule-bound and very WASPish—is a sustaining but also a stunting force.

Though the children now have children, no one has matured, just as values have frozen on this conservative landscape, a grand house on a New England island, where everyone has always spent summers together….

"Children" begins brightly: grown-up children wryly bicker, and their mother futilely tries to maintain her equilibrium. There is a universality in the interwoven anxieties and grievances. These concerns are endemic to this family and, as audiences will note, they are endemic to other families as well.

Mr. Gurney has a great deal to say about the strictures of close family bonds, the loss of...