cover art Scott Fowler
“The
collected works of
A R Gurney
make up what may be the longest goodbye in American theater, a sustained cry of
farewell to an endangered life form. Make that forms. Though Mr Gurney is best
known for his chronicles of the disappearing species called WASP, he has been
just as passionate, in his gentlemanly way, in considering the decline of live
theater.
Both breeds of dinosaur walk the earth with a delicate tread in BUFFALO
GAL…and is the most appealing Gurney comedy to arrive in New York since MRS
FARNSWORTH politely flirted with the notion of bringing down
George W Bush
four years ago….
…BUFFALO GAL brings a longtime spiritual collaborator of Mr Gurney’s to the
fore. That’s Chekhov, the greatest of elegist-dramatists and a man intimately
steeped in the ways of gentry on the edge of extinction and anxious artists of
the stage.
Chekhov’s CHERRY ORCHARD provides the template for BUFFALO GAL…. Like Madame
Ranevskaya, the CHERRY ORCHARD character she plays, Amanda has come to revisit
the world that shaped her, perhaps for the last time.
Set entirely on the stage where rehearsals for THE CHERRY ORCHARD are to
begin the next day BUFFALO GAL is more Chekhovian in theme than in style….
But Mr Gurney shares with that Russian master a clarity of vision regarding
his characters, whose inability to act on their ideals is rendered with
nonjudgmental wryness. Mr Gurney loves his anachronistic losers as much as he
loves the theater. And BUFFALO GAL glows with a rueful affection that makes it
impossible to dislike….
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
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