Times drama critic Frank Rich, in his review of The Dining Room, wrote, "As a chronicler of contemporary America's most unfashionable social stratum — upper-middle-class WASPs, this playwright has no current theatrical peer." In his 1988 play, "The Cocktail Hour", the lead character tells her playwright son that theater critics "don't like us.... They resent us. They think we're all Republicans, all superficial and all alcoholics. Only the latter is true." The New York Times described the play as witty observations about a nearly extinct patrician class that regards psychiatry as an affront to good manners, underpaid hired help as a birthright. In a 1989 interview with The New York Times, Gurney said, "Just as it's mentioned in The Cocktail Hour,' my great-grandfather hung up his clothes one day and walked into the Niagara River and no one understood why." Gurney added that "he was a distinguished man in Buffalo. My father could never mention it, and it affected the family well into the fourth generation as a dark and unexplainable gesture. It made my father and his father desperate to be accepted, to be conventional, and comfortable. It made them commit themselves to an ostensibly easy bourgeois world. They saw it so precariously, but the reason was never mentioned. I first learned about it after my father died." Gurney told The Washington Post in 1982: WASPs do have a culture — traditions, idiosyncrasies, quirks, particular signals and totems we pass on to one another. But the WASP culture, or at least that aspect of the culture I talk about, is enough in the past so that we can now look at it with some objectivity, smile at it, and even appreciate some of its values. There was a closeness of family, a commitment to duty, to stoic responsibility, which I think we have to say weren't entirely bad." Plays Ancestral Voices Another Antigone () Big Bill Black Tie () Buffalo Gal A Cheever Evening (based on stories by John Cheever; ) Children () The Cocktail Hour () The Comeback () Crazy Mary Darlene The David Show The Dining Room () Family Furniture Far East The Fourth Wall () The Golden Age () The Golden Fleece The Grand Manner () The Guest Lecturer Heresy Human Events Indian Blood Labor Day () Later Life () The Love Course () Love Letters () The Middle Ages () Mrs. Farnsworth Office Hours ()