Someone very near and dear to me is a retired fellow who loves listening to talk radio as he goes through household chores. He's an extremely bright man (he made his living as a high-tech innovator, designer and researcher), educated, obsessively well-informed, a diehard liberal, and very fond of the programs where people sound off to promote the left wing agenda. With the understanding that I'm as much a Democrat as he, and think liberalism rocks, I can't help but find the relentlessness of the programming a bit numbing. I once challenged him about it, saying, "You're not really learning much, you're mostly just getting reinforcement for the things you already believe." He just said, "No, that's not true," and while we debated it good-naturedly for a few minutes, it wasn't hot enough a subject to dwell on, so we migrated to other things and have never revisited it since. Yet, seemingly minor as the mini-event may seem, it stays with me and perfectly sums up both my feelings about A.R. Gurney's latest play, Buffalo Gal, and my acceptance of the audience reaction.
The play is set in the present, on the stage of a professional community theatre in Buffalo, New York, about to mount a new production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, where a concerned director, Jackie (Jennifer Regan) awaits the appearance of her star, a fifty- or sixtyish Buffalo-born gal who made good in Hollywood as an elegant character actress. Jackie's concern is well-founded: she's a seasoned pro herself and she recognizes the signs of flightiness: the star has requested a day-early arrival so she can "see the space" and meet the director...all indicators that she's nervous about returning to the stage after too long in television, and by extension, probably nervous about learning and retaining a lot of lines after years of needing only to work in short bursts in front of the camera.
The star, Amanda (Susan Sullivan) arrives, all grand gestures and practiced modesty, at once both acquiescent and demanding, proclaiming fervently that only the theatre is where things are real, she has so needed to be back here to replenish her soul; and all the while, her unseen agent, back in Los Angeles is trying to make a lucrative TV deal, that she turned down for this minumum-scale play, work: the producers still want her and concessions are being made...
Other characters are involved in witnessing and facilitating the push-pull that will determine the real strength of Amanda's stated convictions—the doggedly loyal stage manager (James Waterston), the over-zealous intern (Carmen M. Herlihy), the replacement leading man who must endure an approvals meeting (Dathan B. Williams), and even the old boyfriend (Mark Blum) who stayed in town and buckled to parental pressure rather than follow his show-business dreams—but there seems scant little suspense in the outcome because—
—and this is the crucial thing—
—Gurney has started the play with the director reading the signs the same way Sherlock Holmes reads the clues. Jackie's portrayed and played as a serious pro; and while perhaps a lay audience may not fully understand how it's possible for her to so accurately predict the outcome of events before meeting her star in the flesh, I can tell you from long experience that smart theatre pros can similarly and accurately diagnose a dynamic like Amanda's from miles away, simply via recognition of a communications pattern or manner, with the skill of expert therapists—which is, in a way, what many are.
Fans of The West Wing may remember an episode called called No‘l, in which Josh (Bradley Whitford), who has survived a shooting, is under the mandatory care of trauma specialist Stanley (Adam Arkin), who, throughout a long session, is getting progressively under Josh's skin with constant insistence that he's covering the true details of how he subsequently injured his hand. Defensively, Josh challenges, "You diagnosed me in eight hours?" and Stanley shocks him by replying, "Josh, I diagnosed you in five minutes."
The difference between Aaron Sorkin's script there and Gurney's here however is that Stanley only announces this when Josh is finally on the cusp of facing his demon. It's Stanley's job to get Josh to reveal something being suppressed. The nature of that something is the episode's mystery, and though it's clear Stanley intuits the truth, he doesn't share it with us, because his object is to make Josh reveal it. In Buffalo Gal, however Jackie essentially, in a few brief sentences, details Amanda's pathology right at the top. She knows whatŐs being hidden—and she tells us. And again—prior to the star's entrance. Once Amanda appears, the rest of the evening merely illustrates the accuracy of the extrapolation.
Which really only leaves what I'll call the "Shavian" elements of the evening to surprise us—the debates and discussions about art, artists, purity of vision and dedication to craft—but there too, the dialectic covers the familiar ground of how theatre, for all its usual poverty and uncertainty, is a nobler calling than TV and film. Which is of course baloney—a calling is only as noble as the person who heeds it, and every medium has its value...but it is certainly the mantra of the diehard trouper who sees, or has, no other choice but to follow the theatrical muse.
But it's also often (if not universally) the clarion cry of the diehard theatre fan, the chronic theatregoer. It's a sentiment that encourages comradeship, a feeling of comfort, of belonging within a rarefied enclave—
—and as such, it wins over the audience at Buffalo Gal. The direction by Mark Lamos, per usual in my experience of his work, encourages performances that are agreeable but a bit too self-consciously "stagey" (though Susan Sullivan, ironically, rises above that, despite portraying a character who embodies affectation) and there are only pockets of brief tension in this slenderest of stories—
—yet the play comes off as a modest triumph because it speaks proudly to its patrons' already cherished prejudices about the superiority of theatre and the theatrical life. It's rather like a summer stock massage.
So I can't say it nay. Nor can I in good conscience steer you clear. All I can tell you is, it's an entirely professional and respectable evening, and I found myself never bored, but nonetheless increasingly impatient with it.
And if it sounds odd to hear these thoughts coming from a dedicated, longtime theatre pro, all I can tell you is, Buffalo Gal struck me much like those talk radio shows my distinguished old gentleman listens to: a needless appeal to an already-swayed sensibility that would never question its validity...
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