Entertainment

WASP-y ‘Black Tie’ doesn’t have much sting

The prolific A.R. Gurney has made a specialty of documenting a certain slice of America: Northeast-based, white, middle-class families bound by a strong sense of kinship and precisely delineated social circles.

In “Black Tie,” the comedy that opened last night at Primary Stages, the playwright shows that WASP-ness is kept together by a sense of tradition and good manners. Lose them, he suggests, and everything goes down the drain.

Here, old-fashioned civility is at the center of the conflict between an idealized past of tight-knit nuclear families, and a confusing future of blended broods and mixed ethnicities. Things aren’t looking good for the nostalgia camp: The multiculti barbarians are at the gate.

Propriety is represented by Curtis (Gregg Edelman) and his father (Daniel Davis), a man to the country-club born. Curtis is about to give a speech at his son’s rehearsal dinner, and his dad’s dropped by the hotel to give a few pointers.

Never mind that Grandpa is dead and only Curtis can see him.

As the play goes on, Curtis is increasingly on the defense. His ideas of what’s appropriate at weddings — like wearing a tuxedo, for starters — don’t necessarily match those of the younger, more informal generation.

“I personally like to believe that people can be funny without being raw,” Curtis says, primly, having learned that the bride’s ex — a popular shock comedian — is planning to do a routine.

Curtis’ wife (the dry Carolyn McCormick, looking straight out of a J.Crew catalog) is less enamored of her ex-father-in-law’s memory, but she eventually comes around and realizes what a great guy he was.

The audience may be harder to convince.

Under Mark Lamos’ zippy direction, the actors are all in tip-top form and the tone is one of

benign amusement. But a lot of the jokes derive from tired stereotyping. Gurney seems to suggest that the WASP way of life has been eroded by the combined assaults of modernity, political correctness and Jewish comics.

Watching “Black Tie,” you have to wonder if WASPs didn’t dig their own grave.

elisabeth.vincentelli@nypost.com