COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: ‘Buffalo Gal’ plays best in NYC
When Betty Buckley left town after her stint in A. R. Gurney’s play “Buffalo Gal,” the cast and crew of the Studio Arena Theatre production gave her a toilet seat with my picture on it. So I was cheerfully told by people there later.
I’d written some harsh things about the Studio Arena Theatre’s production in general and particularly the inappropriateness of casting Buckley in the lead role as an actress with an aristocratic Buffalo background.
Absolutely nothing about Buckley was even moderately believable as a Buffalo aristocrat, and I said so in print. She’s pure Texas cowgirl through and through — an actress of proven talent and appeal (especially in musical theater) but as a member of the Buffalo social class in which A. R. Gurney was raised, utterly ridiculous. Absolutely perfect casting, I wrote, would have been a frequent Gurney actress now familiar to most people as a comic maternal harridan in TV’s sitcom “Two and a Half Men”: Holland Taylor.
In the play, in fact, the actress comes back to perform at a struggling regional theater production while being wooed by a sitcom.
The contrapuntal intricacy involved in “Buffalo Gal” is truly virtuosic, which is the major reason why the wrong actress in the key role is such a bad idea.
Now imagine Susan Sullivan, a superb actress also familiar to people from television sitcoms (“Dharma and Greg”) but also one with all the patrician flavor that the role demands. For those who missed Colin Dabkowski’s piece in the Saturday paper, Sullivan is the star of the current Broadway production of “Buffalo Gal” that is getting middling-to-good- reviews.
Well surely someone is wrong here, and someone is right. Then again, maybe not.
The idea that whatever has remained in Buffalo is notably inferior to what has not is a foolish one; in fact, refutation of that is one of the thematic elements of the play.
You have no idea how much I wish I weren’t in the vast minority that finds Gurney overrated.
I don’t know him. I’ve been on a school alumni panel with him and I’ve always known people who knew him, including a woman he dated. A gay uncle of his whose social ostracism provides the story for one of his plays was a camp counselor of mine when I was 7 or 8. I knew him a little a couple decades later when he had an apartment in the same building as the woman I later married and invited us to his parties.
I admire the intricacy of “Buffalo Gal” enormously –the counterpoint of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” with the current travails of Gurney’s gallantly struggling childhood city and those of the gallant struggling art form to which he has given his life (made all the more poignant by the death of the very regional theater that presented “Buffalo Gal.”)
It’s his rue for a vanishing social class and a vanishing life that seems socially myopic to me — not to mention the relentless penchant for stereotyped characters, also as much in evidence in “Buffalo Gal” as a World War II movie.
When I read all the critics trying to get a handle on Buffalo in the reviews of “Buffalo Gal” online, I couldn’t help thinking of the late Tim Russert, as obsessional an elegist for blue collar South Buffalo life as Gurney is of Delaware District privilege.
If ever there were two Buffalonians in perfect counterpoint to one another, it’s Tim Russert and A. R. Gurney. And you have no idea how much I wish there’d been a lot more Russert in Gurney and a lot more Gurney in Russert.
How much clearer a picture of Buffalo people would have elsewhere if the two separate Buffalos they’d grown up in had not just freely mingled in their lives but in the nostalgic result.
