Silly tragedy

Blue Leaves is savagely funny

by Bill Rodriguez

THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. By John Guare. Directed by Harland Meltzer. With John Lenartz, Marion Markham, Cary Barker, and Sean Power. At Colonial Theatre through July 4.

It's no surprise that playwright John Guare once compared his popular The House of Blue Leaves to a love child of Feydeau and Strindberg. On the one hand you have loopy farce with absurd situations, comical nuns, and fools galore. On the other, you have four people murdered -- by a bomb and a strangulation -- and more self-delusion among the survivors than there are vacant stares in a Bergman retrospective.

A mighty tricky balance. Yet the current Colonial Theatre production keeps the entire tottering contrivance not only upright but humming along as it sways this way into silliness and that way toward tragedy. Director Harland Meltzer keeps a terrific mostly Equity cast fired up to a frenzy even when they're stock still, the manic intensity of their absurd dreams flaring out like headlights.

The wacky characters are in the black comedy tradition of cultural caricatures so appallingly recognizable that we laugh in defense, to ward off taking them seriously. Zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy (John Lenartz) fancies himself a songwriter, plunking out ditties like "Where's the Devil in Evelyn?" on a piano in his freezing 1965 Queens apartment. His wife, Bananas (Marion Markham), is crazy, frying up Brillo pads to feed him; she recently tried to slash her wrists with spoons. His girlfriend is Bunny Flingus (Cary Barker), who makes up for being a poor, if ready, sex mate by refusing to cook for him till they are married ("We gotta save some magic for the honeymoon"). Son Ronnie Shaughnessy (Sean Power) is an Army AWOL, a homicidal psychopath who aims to blow up the visiting Pope Paul VI in Shea Stadium that afternoon, disguised as an altar boy. In all their eyes, His Holiness has serious competition from household-name Hollywood director Billy Einhorn (Paul Buxton), a boyhood friend of Artie and Bananas, whom Artie sees as his entrée to fame and fortune.

It is their fatuous and illusory attitudes toward celebrity that binds all the characters of The House of Blue Leaves and unifies Guare's play as a social satire. Bunny is the most explicit about the virtue of celebrities and the most dismissive of mere mortals; to the ever anguished Bananas she declares, "You're a nobody, and you suffer like a nobody." Ronnie delights at the idea that assassinating the Pope could get him scads of media interviews. Even a gaggle of nuns from New Jersey who invade the apartment to catch the Pope on TV -- they couldn't get close enough when he passed on the street -- carry on like hysterical Beatles fans.

Lenartz gives us a bright-eyed, brazen nervous wreck as Artie, whose self-confidence is in most convincing shape when he brags about how brave he is with the Central Park animals he feeds. Barker is hilarious as Bunny, with blazing grin and Brooklyn accent as overpowering as her vicarious ambition for Artie. Power is great as homicidal son Ronnie, from impish grin at the wordless Act I closing to the whirlwind monologue that open Act II, as Ronnie acts out his humiliating fantasy as a kid. That set piece is Guare's funniest scene: Einhorn had been searching the country for the perfect Huck Finn, and Ronnie's impromptu, unsought audition is a tour de farce of the sort of ill-fated self-deception that afflicts just about everyone here. More problematical to portray is Bananas, although Markham gives it her all. For Bananas is a dead serious messenger trying to be heard in the midst of a laff riot, a reminder that if unflinching honesty toward tempting delusions doesn't lead to madness it sure as hell looks crazy in contrast.

Director Meltzer keeps up an effective tension with a frenetic pace that slackens now and then only to be tugged taut. Solid support is given by the main secondary characters. Buxton is an earnest Hollywood mogul as Einhorn, even when he steals Artie's most precious possession and says it's for his own good. Angela Roberts is very funny as Corrina Stroller, Billy's girlfriend; absurd non sequitur dialogue follows when Bananas mistakes the movie starlet's tiny hearing aids for her lithium and swallows them. Even the littlest nun gets an interestingly amiable personality, from Kathleen Moore Ambrosini, in a scene of ironic relief when her two companions blow up. Production values are top-notch, from the glum set design of the apartment by Christian Wittwer, to the costumes by Joy Thibodeau and lighting design by Brian Aldous.

The House of Blue Leaves garnered a 1970 NY Drama Critics Circle prize for Guare, and eight Tony nominations for its 1986 revival. Its impact is timeless, as is Guare's fascination with the ways people manage to reconstruct some self-respect in the face of life's daily humiliations. Kudos to Colonial for capturing the play's savagely funny seriousness anew.