John Cheever, master chronicler of Americas post-war angst and alienation, and how it affected a burgeoning suburban class, left a storehouse of dramatic possibilities in his fiction, largely unexplored purely by dint of his chosen artistic medium: prose. In A CHEEVER EVENING, A. R. Gurney brings to light these possibilities through his mastery of stagecraft. Adapting no fewer than seventeen of Cheever's most funny and moving of stories, Gurney probes the affairs of that set of people (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who once felt in the majority, but soon found themselves in the twilight of their power and at the mercy of a changing world. Seen through the lens of A.R. Gurney's dramatic sensibility, Cheever's separate stories of a fragmented and lonely universe combine into a whole and resonant portrait - that of a culture which, while teetering on the brink of extinction, combats loss with humour, wit and feeling.
