The Golden Age (Gurney)
by A R Gurney

THE STORY: The play takes place in a once elegant townhouse in Manhattan, the home of Isabel Hastings Hoyt, an aging but still charming recluse who had been a glittering figure in the literary salons of the 1920s.

Now short of money, Mrs. Hoyt is concerned about the future of her granddaughter, Virginia, a twice-divorced near-alcoholic whom she hopes to see securely married before she herself, as she puts it, “kicks the bucket.”

In earlier years, Mrs. Hoyt was friend and confidante of many world figures, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald who, it is rumored, used her as the model of Daisy in The Great Gatsby .

This fact leads Tom, an ambitious young academic, to seek her out.

Tom believes that Mrs. Hoyt possesses an unpublished chapter from Gatsby which depicts passionate lovemaking between Gatsby and Daisy, a literary treasure which he is determined to procure no matter how devious the means.

It is this obsession that sets up the increasingly complex and perilous relationship which develops between the three protagonists—a relationship that, inexorably, leads to the startling and ironic denouement of the play.