["Scenes from American Life"] is both satire and valedictory. It is a cluster of scenes—some of them as brief as sketches—about the lives of the well-connected and the well-to-do in Buffalo between the early thirties and what is probably the middle eighties, by which time the country has been taken over by the military and we have become a Fascist state. It must be said at once that the author's underlying pessimism and apocalyptic outlook in no way dim his wit and his sense of fun; along with the comedy there is sadness, and even tragedy, shown or implied, in "Scenes from American Life," but the play is never bleak, and heaven knows it is never dull. (pp. 95-6)

[Mr. Gurney] is himself from Buffalo, and he seems almost to have chosen his scenes at random while rooting through his memories rather than to have made...