Buffalo Gal
Note
5-page PDF piano/vocal score of song "Say When" for production.Description
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?
Production Info
Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
Press Quotes
“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
Author
A R GurneyA R ("Pete") Gurney's work has been produced in New York at Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, and Primary Stages. Among his plays are THE DINING ROOM, THE COCKTAIL HOUR, LOVE LETTERS, SYLVIA, FAR EAST, THE FOURTH WALL, and BIG BILL. Four of his more political plays — O JERUSALEM, MRS FARNSWORTH, SCREEN PLAY, and POST MORTEM — have been produced at the Flea Theater in Tribeca. Gurney also wrote several published novels, as well as the libretto for Michael Torke's opera Strawberry Fields, presented by the New York City Opera. A former Professor of Literature at M I T, he was elected in 2005 to the Theater Hall of Fame and in 2006 to The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He passed away in June 2017. Audio Interview [audioplayer file="//www.broadwayplaypublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/Bonus-Weekend-Podcast_-A.R.-Gurney-a.mp3" titles="Leonard Lopate Interviews A R Gurney" artists="" bg="434343"]
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 12/1/2008 |
| Pages | 76 |
| ISBN | 9780881454284 |
Special Notes
"Say When"
Music by Thomas Cabaniss
Lyrics by A R Gurney
First produced at the Williamstown Theater Festival
and subsequently by Primary Stages, New York
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com