A wild ride

URI Theatre tackles John Guare's blackly comic Blue

by Bill Rodriguez

THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES by John Guare. Directed by Neal Baron. With T.J. Curran, Carolyn Coughlin, Scott Sanborn, Paula D. Prendergast, and Fabio Iannella. At URI Theatre, through October 19.

Dying is easy, the old actor's deathbed lament goes, comedy is hard. Black comedy, it could be added, may look as easy as fatally falling off a banana peel, but it's the hardest of all. Yet with the help of a very funny cast, URI Theatre is going all out to try to make John Guare's dark farce The House of Blue Leaves the absurd pleasure it is.

The play itself certainly is a carnival ride. You have your scheme to blow up the Pope, your papal groupie nuns, your songwriting zookeeper, and your assorted other crazies. Guare plays raucous riffs on our celebrity culture, '60s mode, where every character would rather be famous than be themselves, would prefer to gawk at a remote celebrity -- whether religious or Hollywood icon -- than pay attention to the potential loved one clamoring in front of them.

It's 1965 and Pope Paul VI is visiting New York that day. Artie Shaughnessy (T.J. Curran), whose Queens apartment we're at, has other things on his mind. He's a zookeeper who wants to become a big-time songwriter, even though moon/June seems beyond him as a clever rhyme and he insists on stealing popular melodies for his music. For another thing, Artie is desperate to get his girlfriend, Bunny Flingus (Carolyn Coughlin), to cook for him, but she's holding off till their honeymoon. (She dispenses sex as freely as cheek pecks, but she's terrible at it so she has to to hold out something he craves.)

Living in this madness is Artie's crazy wife, Bananas (Paula D. Prendergast), who thinks he wants her fatter so there would be more of her to hate, and who has been known to try slashing her wrists with spoons. Bunny tells her she's "a nobody," so her suffering isn't worth spit. Lust for fame or the famous, that's the theme that ties together all these wackos and fuels their lunatic actions. Early on, when Bunny says, "When famous people dream at night, it's us they dream of," we eventually see she's talking nightmares.

Celebrity fascination is bound to come from the three nuns who invade the apartment, insisting that the TV be turned to the Pope's parade. One wields a ruler, and she knows how to use it. On the receiving end of fame is Hollywood director Billy Einhorn (Scott Sanborn), an old pal of Artie's from the neighborhood. He shows up with fiancé Corrina Stroller (Taryn DeVito), a movie star who dispenses with her "dahling" diction when not under public scrutiny.

But the spookiest dimension of the fame fetish is shown by Artie and Bananass' son Ronnie (Fabio Iannella), the mad bomber who plans to blast himself out of anonymity by blowing up the Pope. Like Christopher Walken in the 1986 Broadway revival, Iannella is chilling, even when he just stands there, even before the long monologue that opens Act II with Ronnie's psychotic swan song. The acting throughout is a treat, from Coughlin's venomously amiable Bunny, through Prendergast's feisty but flinching Bananas, to Curran's hapless and hopeful Artie.

However, as an ensemble effort, the pace sometimes slackens, with little subtext tension guiding us through the occasional pregnant pause. Sometimes we get a glimpse of a character that playwright Guare was going for but who never climbs out of the actor. For one example, Prendergast delights us with Bananas' wacky charm, but we never see the poignant desperation implied by her telling zookeeper Artie that she wants her emotions "to come out like wild animals."

The surface of The House of Blue Leaves (the title refers to the sanitarium that Artie wants to send his wife to) certainly is uproarious enough to keep us entertained for an evening. But this play has the potential to move us as well, and director Elmo Terry-Morgan, of Brown's Rites & Reason, hasn't gotten it to that level. For a comedy that concludes with an unexpected murder, the sense of inevitability that should rescue that act from absurdity, and arbitrariness, is missing.