Theater: Won't You Come Out to 59E59 Tonight?

Susan Sullivan may have made her name on television with such disparate fare as Falcon Crest and Dharma and Greg, but with A.R. Gurney’s new play Buffalo Gal, she proves to New York audiences that she can more than hold her own on stage.

Sullivan adds an extra layer of meta-theatricality to a play about a West Coast film actress who returns East to her stage roots. But Amanda is both a comically over-the-top diva (incessantly bowing so low to the people she meets that her knees almost hit the floor) and a terrified woman whose age may have placed her career beyond rehabilitation. Thus, she comes back home to Buffalo to star in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, a show itself about what home means. But her first day back, while discussing the show (and whatever bits of her past she cares to divulge) with director Jackie (Jennifer Regan), her agent calls with a sitcom offer that may solve her financial woes.

While Sullivan turns in a graceful, comic performance that perhaps makes Buffalo Gal more impressive than it actually is (the rest of the characters are so didactic that they belong more to a college lecture on the theatre), she’s also the show’s undoing. Listening to the judgmental Jackie become exasperated with the confused and torn Amanda, who’s been charm incarnate, is an exercise in irritation for the audience. Part of the problem lies in the character, who says things like, “You might say she cares desperately” without a trace of irony, but Regan, under Mark Lamos’ direction, also does little to make Jackie more palatable, constantly snapping at everyone on stage; to make matters more annoying, Amanda has made a point to arrive a day before the rest of the cast, so her digressions aren’t costing Jackie or anyone else any time. But then, Jackie has her own mercenary reasons for the show to be a hit.

Filling out the rest of the cast, Carmen M. Herlihy does what she can with the role of the assistant stage manager, who’s prepared to drop whatever she’s doing to discuss the history of community theater (much to the militant Jackie’s fury, of course); James Waterston is the no-nonsense stage manager who’s all too familiar to anyone who ever looked forward to having a good time in a show, and Dathan B. Williams and Mark Blum are two men from Amanda’s distant past.

Luckily, Gurney has crafted enough moments (and one song) dripping with melancholy and longing in Buffalo Gal that more than make up for whatever lapses in dialogue and performances may occur. The show’s final, ambiguous moments, which Amanda and Jackie share alone on stage, are some of the most achingly sad currently on stage. Too bad Jackie’s so wrapped up in her own life that she doesn’t understand what the theater means to everyone else.

Thru Sept. 13. 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (betw. Madison & Park Aves.), 212-279-4200; $45.