cover art by David Prittie
“The fundamental things may still
apply, but they warp and change color as time goes by. In his gleefully partisan
new the indefatigable A R Gurney takes on the movie that immortalized the song
As Time Goes By, retooling Casablanca for the 21st century. The
title of his latest work is simply SCREEN PLAY, but were it actually to make it
to movie theaters it would no doubt be called Buffalo.
That's Buffalo, NY, which, in Mr Gurney's collegiate caper of a
play, set in the year 2015, has become a way station for Americans in a blue
state of mind who seek passage across the border into Canada. Rick's Cafe is now
a bar named Nick's. And, as in the adored Warner Brothers' classic, it's the
place where everybody goes—from Peter Lorre-like parasites who peddle illegal
visas to handsome freedom fighters and their beautiful companions, as well as
their sneering adversaries, who in this version are not Nazis but politicians of
the Christian right.
SCREEN PLAY is the third of Mr Gurney's works that deals directly
with American politics, following the sincere… O JERUSALEM and the disarming MRS
FARNSWORTH.
True, the show often brings to mind a vintage Mad magazine
movie spoof, with its contented goofiness and satiric swipes at big targets.
And, of course, you wait to see how Mr Gurney roasts chestnuts like `Round up
the usual suspects' and `Here's looking at you, kid.'
But the gimmick that is the basis of SCREEN PLAY has a built-in
resonance that Mr. Gurney amplifies without, for the most part, screeching a
sermon. There's a grin-making chutzpah in the very idea of relocating the moral
crisis of Casablanca to American shores. For Mr Gurney sees the internal
war between cynicism and idealism waged by Humphrey Bogart's hard-bitten
romantic Rick as being especially pertinent to today's climate of political
fatigue and passivity.
…For Mr Gurney, being frivolous has become a deadly national
epidemic. SCREEN PLAY, it turns out, fights frivolity with frivolity.
“A R Gurney wrote this irreverent
political satire--a left-wing broadside grafted onto the plot of Casablanca.
…the unstaged-reading format makes this neat little package so efficient to
stage and cheap to produce, SCREEN PLAY could be tossed in a suitcase and
assembled as needed, wherever demoralized Democrats gather to contemplate dark
deeds of Jacobean revenge….
SCREEN PLAY is a clever pastiche of that immortal wartime film
classic in which Humphrey Bogart plays cynical host to the political scum of the
earth at Rick's Cafe Americain in no man's-land Morocco.
Action is transposed here to no man's land Buffalo and set in 2015,
when the U S is supposedly governed by a Republican dictatorship of right-wing
religious fanatics.
Gurney's script abides original source by observing formulaic
elements like the border lockdown that prompts brisk underworld traffic in bogus
passports for illegal immigrants frantic to make it over the border to—where
else—Canada.
…the 2000 presidential election, which in Gurney's book was the
criminal event that drove every decent American (including a noble Ingrid
Bergman stand-in and her freedom-fighter husband) running for the border….
…the play's the thing, here, with its pointed political jabs and
hilarious Buffalo gags. Setting the show in his hometown gives Gurney joke
rights to such objects of civic pride as Niagara Falls. It also allows scribe to
pen the funniest line in show: `We'll always have Buffalo.'”
Marilyn Stasio, Variety
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