Timothy Patrick Finnegan, Chris Kelly, Andre J. Liegl, David Butler, Eric Rawski, Kurt Guba and Tim Klein in "Love! Valour! Compassion!" at BUA.

This week will see the opening of two plays with special resonance for Buffalo. BUA’s revival of Terrence McNally’s 1994 play, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and the Buffalo premiere of native son A.R. Gurney’s The Fourth Wall at the Kavinoky Theatre.

Buffalo United Artists was the first company in the world to produce Love! Valour! Compassion! after the landmark work finished its Broadway engagement. In fact, BUA opened their production just weeks later, under the direction of BUA founder Javier Bustillos, who won an Artie Award for his efforts. BUA is using the current revival to celebrate their 15th anniversary as a company—a celebration that includes the one night return of their very first production, A…My Name is Alice, with their original 1992 cast.

Love! Valour! Compassion! marks a high point in the career of McNally, prolific author of such plays as The Ritz (1975), Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), The Lisbon Traviata (1989), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and Master Class (1995), as well as the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992) and Ragtime (1997). Often described as neo-Chekhovian, the play follows a group of gay friends on three summer weekends at the Dutchess County home of one of them. Love! Valour! Compassion! rode the crest of a surge of drama about gay characters onto Broadway, in which homosexuality and the AIDS crisis were, in many ways, synonymous. Angels in America and Rent are also of this vintage. Back in the early 1990s, it was just occurring to the public at large that hysteria was, perhaps, not the most constructive reaction to HIV.

Both comical and soulful, in McNally’s play a group of close friends confronts mortality, their gay identities, self-esteem and their personal assessments of what is most important in life. Bustillos will again direct, this time with a cast featuring David Butler, Timothy Patrick Finnegan, Kurt Guba, Chris Kelly, Tim Klein, Andrew J. Liegl and Eric Rawski.

A.R. Gurney’s The Fourth Wall is rather a different Gurney from the one familiar to this, his home town. Here we have come to enjoy the comfort of seeing Gurney skewer familiar upper-middle-class Buffalonians, even as he celebrates them. Recently, however, Gurney has gained a reputation for more biting satire, with plays like Mrs. Farnsworth, Screen Play and Post Mortem, in which he takes aim at the Bush administration and turns out to be a far better shot than Dick Cheney.

In The Fourth Wall, Gurney meets Pirandello. The play begins in the familiar Gurney-esque surroundings of an upper-middle-class home. The characters begin to notice that the living room is set up as if for a play, with all the furniture favoring one wall. The lady of the house admits that she, in fact, believes that one wall of her home is a “fourth wall,” as in a theater, and that there is an audience beyond, watching.

This premise evolves into socio-political comedy and commentary.

The Fourth Wall had an unusually long gestation period for a Gurney play. I saw the original production at the Hasty Pudding in Cambridge back in 1992, where it starred Kelly Bishop and Tony Roberts. Sandy Duncan and Charles Kimbrough played the roles in the show’s New York debut at Primary Stages, 12 years later in 2004, under the direction of David Saint.

Directed by Kavinoky artistic director David Lamb, The Fourth Wall features Steve Cooper, Lisa Ludwig, Paul Todaro and Christina Rausa—a Fredonia-based actress who we are seeing with increasing and welcome frequency in Buffalo. She appeared earlier this season in the Road Less Traveled production of War Room. Cooper, Ludwig and Todaro regularly appear as members of the Kavinoky ensemble, which has proven to be particularly adept with Gurney’s work.

The Kavinoky has enjoyed great success with Gurney. They produced the Buffalo premiere of The Cocktail Hour last year to great acclaim, and Gurney’s civilized comic style suits their company quite perfectly.