"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."
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
"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
