The Sunset Gang

The short story series about aging in America that inspired the PBS American Playhouse TV trilogy produced by Linda Lavin and starring Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, Dori Brenner and Jerry Stiller, garnering Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for 'Best Supporting Actress' in a mini-series. 


In America, where “old” is a dirty word, people over sixty-five are often shut out as if growing old were some kind of contagious disease. But you cannot shut the Sunset Gang out of your heart. If you let them in, they will teach you a lot about living-a subject on which, after all, they are the experts. With time running short, these intrepid residents of Sunset Village in Florida continue to thirst for life and love. 


“The Sunset Gang” is as lively, fun, and courageous a group as you’ll find anywhere this side of the Last Reward. The fact that you’ll find them at Sunset Village, a condominium retirement community in Florida – where an ambulance siren is the theme song and cycling at a stately pace is strenuous exercise – does not mean that they are ready to pack it all in. Not by a long shot. 


Sex and romantic love keep Sunset Village bubbling with activity. If you were to walk down one of its well-tended paths, you might spot Jenny and Bill sitting on a bench, acting like young lovers, and never suspect that they are married – to other people! And at the pool, Max Bernstein, with an expertise that comes from five decades of skirt chasing, is singling out attractive widows. 


But the true beating heart of Sunset Village is the love of family and friends. Widowed Molly Berkowitz learns that although her son and daughter may be failures in the eyes of the world, they are well worth bragging about, and Isaac Kramer begins to feel truly at home when the gray-haired boys down at the Laundromat start calling him by his old neighborhood nickname, “Itch.”