Buffalo Gal

Amanda is a once successful television personality whose star is now fading. Life imitates art as she returns to her hometown of Buffalo to star in Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Just as she is connecting with her roots - both onstage and off - she is called back to Hollywood for a role that could recharge her career. Will her love of theater be enough to keep her in Buffalo? "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