[10] Gurney's 2x great-grandfather was Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897), a former Mayor of Buffalo, NY State Treasurer, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives who supported the idea for the first U.S. currency not backed by gold or silver, thus credited with helping to keep the Union economy afloat during the Civil War.
[14] His first play in New York, which ran for just one performance in October 1968, The David Show, premiered at the Players' Theater on MacDougal Street.
The play was cut after its first show by sneers from the entire press except for two enthusiasts, Edith Oliver in The New Yorker and another from the Village Voice.
[15] His 2015 play, Love and Money, is about a mature woman making plans to dispose of her fortune, and the twists that ensue.
[16] Before that, The Grand Manner, a play about his real life encounter with famed actress Katharine Cornell in her production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, was produced and performed by Lincoln Center for the summer of 2010.
[25] Gurney's plays often explore the theme of declining upper-class "WASP" (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) life in contemporary America.
The Wall Street Journal has called his works "penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat.
[15] The New York 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.
"[4] 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.
[27] 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."