Welcome to Gurney country, where the humor is dry:
the theater jokes in The Guest Lecturer
Page 52. They Knew What They Wanted and I Can Get It for You Wholesale are 20th-century
American plays with an ethnic focus – Italian-American and Jewish, respectively. George S.
Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, written in the 1930s and still performed
today, is a comedy about a family of lovable eccentrics who teach the lesson of tolerance.
53. Both The Gin Game (from the 1970s) and Oleanna (from the 1990s) are plays for just two
actors (that is, they don’t cost much to stage), but in terms of the more important matter of
dramatic language they’re from entirely different planets. D. L. Coburn’s The Gin Game is an
introspective study of loneliness and old age, while David Mamet’s Oleanna is a crude
right-wing satire on feminism.
The West End is London’s theater district. And culturally speaking, The Sound of Music, Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s musical about nuns and Nazis, is as white as a mayonnaise sandwich on
Wonder Bread.
58. Hamlet you know about. Hedda Gabler is the eponymous heroine of a tragedy by Henrik
Ibsen (Norwegian, 19th century, look up “eponymous”). Willy Loman is the pathetic protagonist
of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (American, 20th century).
60. “See better, Lear!” is what Shakespeare’s eponymous protagonist King Lear tells himself at
the tragic moment of recognition.
61, 62. Ira Levin’s Deathtrap is a suspense comedy featuring a play within the play. No Exit is a
play by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre about a man and two women tormenting one
another in a boring hotel room and realizing at the end that they’re never going to get out
because they’re in hell. A vom (short for Latin vomitorium) is an exit door. (You’ve heard that
the Romans had rooms called vomitoria, where they vomited up their gargantuan meals so they
could eat more? The story is just a myth: a case of confusion caused by what’s known as folk
etymology. But the Roman architects did have a vomit metaphor in mind when they designed
the amazingly efficient exits for the Colosseum, and that’s where the word comes from. No, I’m
not going to let you forget the Poetry part of Poetry & Drama.)
72. Mr. Peepers was a 1950s sitcom about a lovable nerd high school teacher. Naturally Fred
gets his cultural references from TV.
80. Shakespeare’s passionately sexual tragedy Antony and Cleopatra is about the love affair
between the Roman general Marcus Antonius and Egypt’s last pharaoh, Queen Cleopatra VII.
The speech Mona reads is the one delivered by Cleopatra over Antony’s corpse. “The odds is
gone” means “There’s no difference any more.”
82. Anton Chekhov (Russian, 1860-1904) is one of the classic dramatists, like Shakespeare. Our
contemporary Wendy Wasserstein is, well, not quite in that league. She’s best known for a
1988 feminist comedy called The Heidi Chronicles. TV in-joke: Seinfeld was originally titled The
Seinfeld Chronicles.