Ancestral Voices

Pittsburgh City Paper: "Playwright A.R. Gurney himself owns up to the problem with his Ancestral Voices in its opening monologue. He (the narrator) says that the work began as a play but laments that it covered too much geography, and time, to fit on a stage. He tried to write it as a novel but, he says, there was too much dialogue to work as prose. So he made it what it is: a seated reading/spoken oratorio for five actors. Sad to say, this third form is probably the least successful of all."