Gurney’s Dance of Romance

Remember when people used to hold each other and twirl gracefully around a dance floor? Remember the cotillion, a dancing school tradition now found, if at all, in some of the older, more exclusive prep schools?

A.R. Gurney remembers. And remembers. He calls his “The Snow Ball,” which opened at the Old Globe Thursday, “a new play with old music.” In truth, it’s a new play with old dancing--a quivering memory of mid-century growing up with ballroom dancing that will stir the hearts of those old enough to remember and impress those too young for personal recollections.

Understand: This is not a profound or relevant or urgent play. It is pure enchantment of a nostalgic, humorous and uplifting nature about life among affluent New England WASPS: Gurney’s world--the newest if oldest living minority. It’s no secret that this play, based on Gurney’s novel of the same name, is about a part of his own youth that is rapidly becoming fossilized. An anthropological artifact.

Middle-aged Cooper Jones (James R. Winker) and his friend and former classmate, Lucy Dunbar (Kandis Chappell), are involved in the restoration of a landmark building. During their teens, it was the scene of an annual Snow Ball. This was something of a cross between a debutante extravaganza and a prom, one of those recreational rituals of the privileged long in decline. Lucy believes that it would be great fun to reconstitute this ball just one more time as an inaugural celebration for the restoration. She wants Cooper to help.

Cooper is tempted, because he’s a hopeless romantic in love with his past. Not so his pragmatic wife, Liz (Katherine McGrath), an activist for the homeless, who thinks that such elitist social preoccupation is retrogressive bunk. The fascination for Cooper, who gets involved anyway, centers on reuniting Jack Daley and Kitty Price, the golden couple of those youthful halcyon days, who danced like Fred and Ginger but whose ways parted that long time ago.

The rest of the play is taken up with flashbacks (what’s a memory play without flashbacks?), Lucy’s romantic designs on Cooper, and their efforts to make the Kitty-Jack reunion happen.

Straightforward enough, but in this delicious staging by Jack O’Brien, with exquisitely light-footed choreography by Graciela Daniele (“Dangerous Games”), flawlessly executed by Susan J. Coon (spoiled young Kitty) and Christopher Wells (brash young Jack), the play takes on a significant other dimension.

Not unlike the movie “Ginger and Fred” and the underrated Michael Bennett musical “Ballroom,” it becomes a play about dancing as much as a play with it.

Thus “The Snow Ball” is two things: the simple story of a class reunion, with the wistfulness, amusement and small shocks that implies--and the potent evocation of a nearly extinct tribal rite, with all the sexuality and awe and healing power it can engender.

As theater, it intelligently touches that part of us that yearns to re-create a time of youthful innocence in lives and a century gone awry. As a mood piece, with its old-world elegance, its projections of untainted youth and the unbearable lightness of its appearing, disappearing, reappearing dancing ghosts, it is undiluted romance.

The tall, angular Winker gives us a beguiling Cooper always able, it seems, to laugh at his own sentimentality and therefore defuse it. (He also seems never to age, while others do--a suspension of disbelief mandated by the fact that he’s on stage almost continuously, traveling back and forth within a 30-year span.)

To say that Chappell’s Lucy is directly devious is not an oxymoron. This nervy walking paradox makes us appreciate McGrath’s unfooled and up-front Liz, who knows how to fight for her man by not seeming to be fighting at all. Gurney’s expert handling of these competing women leaves us plenty of room to admire them both.

As indeed we admire nearly everything else: a star cameo by Deborah Taylor as Jack Daley’s hard-as-nails politically aggressive wife, Tom Lacy’s double-duty as bored dancing teacher and banker husband to the older Kitty, and the ethereal dancing of Coon and Wells, followed by the only slightly more earthbound, stylish one of Rita Gardner and Donald Wayne (the older Kitty and Jack).

Douglas W. Schmidt’s majestic set features a sweeping marble staircase, inlaid floor and giant Federal period window (snow falling outside, of course). It is beautifully enhanced by David F. Segal’s complex lighting that allows for the parallel existence of the real and the ephemeral, and by Steven Rubin’s careful costume design, as much a complement to character as a symbol of place and time.

This staging of the “The Snow Ball” was generated and refined at the Hartford Stage (a co-producer), which may account for its polished look here. If Gurney’s play is no more than a classy glance at a vanishing way of life, it is also no less--a finely wrought confection that sends us into the night, hearts singing and toes tapping.

“The Snow Ball,” Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; matinees Saturdays-Sundays, 2. Ends June 16. $25-$28.50; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘The Snow Ball’

James R. Winker: Cooper Jones

Kandis Chappell: Lucy Dunbar

Katherine Mc Grath: Liz Jones

Tom Lacy: Van Dam/Baldwin Hall

Christopher Wells: Young Jack

Susan J. Coon: Young Kitty

Donald Wayne: Jack Daley

Rita Gardner: Kitty Price

Deborah Taylor: Joan Daley

Robert Phalen: Saul Radner

A new play by A.R. Gurney, presented by the Old Globe Theatre and the Hartford Stage Company. Director Jack O’Brien. Choreographer Graciela Daniele. Sets Douglas W. Schmidt. Lights David F. Segal. Costumes Steven Rubin. Sound Jeff Ladman. Ballroom coach Willie Rosario. Stage manager Douglas Pagliotti. Assistant stage manager Peter Van Dyke.