Residency One playwright A.R. (Pete) Gurney returns to Signature with the second play of his
residency - What I Did Last Summer, directed by Gurney’s longtime collaborator Jim Simpson.
What I Did Last Summer, written in 1983, is a partially autobiographical play based on Gurney’s
experience as a teenager growing up near Buffalo, New York. The play takes place on the
Canadian shores of Lake Erie in the summer of 1945, as the Higgins family struggles to maintain
normalcy while their father is away fighting in World War II. When teenaged Charlie finds a
mentor in a reclusive, non-conventional artist named Anna Trumbull, his family spins into crisis.
Gurney and Simpson sat down with Literary Associate Sarah Rose Leonard to discuss coming
of age during wartime, the importance of mentors, and what it means to become an artist.
Signature: Pete, how does it feel to be entering the second show
of your Residency?
A.R. Gurney: Great! The Wayside Motor Inn, the first one, never had any
success before, but with the combination of Signature’s intelligence and
director Lila Neugebauer, the new production worked out very well, and
I had a very good time in the process of doing it. This one [What I Did Last
Summer] always has been a secret favorite of mine; it’s like a child that had
a very difficult upbringing, so I have particular fondness for it.
S: Can you talk a little bit about the autobiographical elements in
What I Did Last Summer?
ARG: I wanted a job in the summer. I think I was fourteen, and there was this
woman who lived “down the beach” as they say, who I’d always heard about.
My mother had known her; my mother had been somewhat of an artist before
she got married. Some of those scenes I wrote with Anna Trumbull are pretty
(left to right): A.R. Gurney.
verbatim what she taught me. I had a great summer with her, and I learned a
A boy in high school Victory Corps
at Flushing High School, Queens,
NY, 1942.
lot. When I left, she gave me a framed Degas drawing of a woman combing
“Superman” comic strip, 1938.
her hair. And she said, “Now this is the real thing.” I had to have it re-framed
A.R. Gurney in his teenage years.
a couple years ago - it’s not the real thing, but it’s a very nice print. Maybe I’ll
bring it in and show it to the cast.
Jim Simpson: Oh, definitely.
ARG: She came to my wedding too, when I married Molly. I have a picture of her in the reception line.
S: So you parted well.
ARG: Oh, yeah, she always was a good friend. She was a kind of town clown in some ways, people
always talked about her. And she was an artist. Her place is still there. Someone bought it, and I’ve
gone out and looked at her place, or where it was, and some of the brick work and the bushes I had
to trim - I learned a little about gardening that summer.
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