Buffalo’s most celebrated native playwright, A.R. “Pete” Gurney, has revisited the city of his birth and heritage numerous times in plays like The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour, The Middle Ages and The Snow Ball. Always, Gurney follows the life of privileged members of Buffalo’s ruling elite, who have servants in their houses, and pilgrims in their ancestry. His new play, Indian Blood, is a fictionalized reminiscence of growing up in this town in 1946, when he was 16 years old. The Primary Stages production will play through September 2, at 59E59 Theaters in New York City, but expect to see this nostalgic yet pointed play again.

In Indian Blood, teenaged Eddie believes that his pedigree includes a remote Native American ancestor, and uses his supposed “Indian blood” as an explanation for his adolescent rebellions against the staid world of Anglo-Saxon Buffalonians around him. The inciting incident is a conflict with his more studious second cousin, Lambert, who jealously busts Eddie for circulating a pornographic cartoon he has drawn during Latin class. The result is Eddie’s two-week suspension from Nichols School, right before Christmas.

Charles Isherwood of the New York Times said of the play, “As slight as it is sweet, A.R. Gurney’s latest play, ‘Indian Blood,’ is like a snow globe for the stage, in this case a memento of wintry Buffalo in the mid-1940’s.” He goes on to describe a play that “glides comfortably by like a series of Norman Rockwell paintings stirring into life. ‘Trouble in the Schoolroom’ would be the natural title for the first tableau vivant, which is then followed by the likes of ‘A Lecture From Father,’ ‘Tree-Trimming With Mother’ and ‘Christmas Dinner at Grandmother’s,’ in which Eddie and Lambert shoot evil glances at each other as the turkey is carved, while the adults sneak second cocktails behind disapproving Grandma’s back.”

The description is vivid and apt, yet Gurney’s play, directed by Mark Lamos, is performed with a few chairs on a blank stage. There is no dining table. There is no Christmas tree. There is no turkey. There are no cocktails. The actors use pantomime to create the world of Buffalo during the course of one Christmas season in 1946. Though Eddie tells the audience that this technique is taken from Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, it is a technique that Gurney, ever a master of the purely theatrical, has used often.

The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward are very period specific, and set designer John Arnone establishes the Buffalo setting with a series of vintage Buffalo postcards showing City Hall, Buffalo Savings Bank, factories, a bustling Main Street and so forth. And with the inventiveness of Lamos and his impressive cast, we see Buffalo vividly, including cathedral-like columns of arching American elms, heavy with snow—at least in our mind’s eye.

The actors who populate the New York production are remarkable, including newcomer Charles Socarides who plays Eddie, the character who stands in for Gurney himself. Jack Gilpin, a veteran of numerous Gurney plays, is the boy’s father, while Rebecca Luker, celebrated for her work in Broadway musicals, plays the mother. John McMartin is superb as the feisty and irreverent grandfather who ignites Eddie’s imagination with fabricated tales of his Seneca grandmother, but who is, himself, probably the genetic source of the boy’s nonconformity.

The story is deceptively simple and unfolds with an ease and graciousness that disguises its pointed critique of Buffalo’s ruling class. Through glimpses at relationships in this one family, Gurney suggests the origins for Buffalo’s downfall in a way that would certainly resonate more pointedly here than in New York, where the play is being interpreted as pure nostalgia. By the play’s conclusion, we fully expect that both Eddie and Lambert will grow up to leave Buffalo, a trend the wily and wise grandfather laments but understands. Whereas New York audiences feel tearful at the loss of Buffalo’s stately elm trees, Buffalonians would more likely feel tearful at the loss of the city itself as one fictitious Buffalo family drives through the snow on Delaware Avenue, unaware of the future the rest of us already live.

Being a Gurney, a descendent of one of Buffalo’s early mayors, and growing up in one of Buffalo’s most prominent families seems to imbue Pete Gurney simultaneously with great pride and great regret. The child of two parents from Buffalo who were also the children of two parents from Buffalo, it is almost as if Gurney feels familial responsibility for the decline of Buffalo. It is a preoccupation that inspires him to return to the city he adores again and again in his plays. None of his plays, however, is more nostalgic and elegant than Indian Blood. It is an exquisite and quietly powerful play.