“House Of Blue Leaves”: My Review
Here’s my Financial Times review of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” now on Broadway starring Ben Stiller, Edie Falco, and Jennifer Jason Leigh (pictured). Full text after the jump.
The opening moments of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, a 1971 play in revival on Broadway, left me puzzled. Artie Shaughnessy, a Central Park zookeeper portrayed by Ben Stiller, is pounding the piano at a local bar in the New York City neighbourhood of Sunnyside, Queens. The production’s director, David Cromer, has placed the character with his back towards the audience and, long after the performance was over, I’ll be damned if I could tell you why.
This sequence turned out to be virtually the only inexplicable move in Cromer’s invigorating revival of a work that, in its mixture of farcical interruption and unsettling pathos, remains oft-imitated but never quite equalled.
The play’s tricky tonal shifts are navigated expertly if not, at this point in the run, always effectively. It takes place on October 4 1965, the day that Pope Paul VI arrives in New York. Bunny Flingus, Shaughnessy’s girlfriend, arrives at his apartment before dawn to rouse him. Actively hostile to Bananas, Shaughnessy’s mentally ill, highly medicated wife, Bunny also wants to awaken her man to seek fame as a songwriter in Hollywood. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Bunny is too sweet to make us believe that she could prod her man to the top, but Leigh nails her laugh lines and her fantasy imitation of Greer Garson bestowing an Oscar on Artie is priceless.
As the shell-shocked Bananas, Edie Falco gives the kind of tear-filled performance that wins real-life awards. Her waterworks threaten to overwhelm the production’s flow but, by the time a trio of madcap nuns arrive at the Shaughnessy apartment, Falco’s stunned reaction provides the evening with its biggest laugh and gives needed balance to the interpretation.
Stiller’s work is less ebullient than that of John Mahoney in the 1986 Broadway revival – a production in which Stiller made his Broadway debut as Ronnie, the Shaughnessys’ Awol-from-the-army son. Effectively hapless, Stiller is more of a straight man, around whom the increasingly chaotic events whirl.
And what chaos! Guare’s play evokes Feydeau, Ionesco, Strindberg. It looks ahead to our own reality-star century. It even suggests the antic-family households of 1930s comedies such as You Can’t Take It With You. But such a disturbing, delightful concoction as The House of Blue Leaves could only have been written by John Guare.
