The House of Blue Leaves

Tickets and Information

Go to Brooklyn!
Youve got four more chances...dont miss the Gallery Players funny and sad production of Guares classic "House of Blue Leaves." Last night the cast was electric, and the audience laughed and sighed in all the right places. There was an audible "oh yes" a few moments before the very end, and then a "no" in the final moment. The acting is wonderful, the direction tight. Not a perfect production but a very good one. Worth the trip to Brooklyn.

Reviewed by piaeldridge on Friday, Sep 25th, 2009

House of Blue Leaves, Gallery Players, Bklyn
The Gallery Players current production of John Guare?s ?The House of Blue Leaves? is a different ?take? from ones I?ve seen before. Directors have a choice of going for the laughs, for the absurdity, or trying to find the pathos of skewed values and failed lives. Director Dev Bondarin successfully does both, as she lets the audience enjoy the zaniness but does not shirk from the substrata of misery that drives the characters. Artie Shaunessy is an undiscovered musician, and rightly so. From his first moment on stage, we note his hoarse voice and the insipid lyrics of original compositions like ?Where?s the Devil in Evelyn.? He is egged on in his feeling that he?s ?too old to be a young talent? by his girl friend and downstairs neighbor, Bunny, another failed creature?she?s worked more than a few jobs and in one of the plays repeated lines, ?I didn?t work for ?.for nix,? tries to use her experience to comment on Artie?s chances for success and the mental deterioration of Artie?s wife, the aptly named Bananas. It?s hard to tell who is the most pathetic of the characters and who deserves our sympathy: Bananas, who walks in and out of her own mental illness, Bunny who is attracted to celebrity at the cost of understanding her own life, or Artie, who veers between love for and utter cruelty to his longtime wife. The play takes place on the day the pope visits NY in 1965, and there are numerous references to the Vietnam War that might make the play seem dated if we were not involved in another fruitless war that makes us hear some of the lines as if they were more current than they are. Dated references aside, we can see ourselves in these people?s lives, including that of a young novice nun, just another person who has made the wrong choice. ?I once saw myself as the bride of Christ,? she says, ?Now I am a?divorcee.? Another train wreck of a character is Artie?s and Banana?s son, who having failed in his youth to attract attention to his acting talents has now hatched a plan to blow up the pope. The acting in Bondarin?s production is uniformly strong and heartfelt. None of the characters has the self-refection to recognize the absurdity of their dreams against the reality of their talents. None has the capacity to recognize their devotion to dubious ideals of celebrity. Their pathos is just in that non-recognition. And the end, although somewhat predictable, still makes one gasp for the sadness of its bizarre inevitability. Burke Adams as Artie delivers a solid, consistent performance as the gravel voiced, no-talent who has a momentary sense of the value of his day job to give life. Stacy Scotte as Bunny has some of the best laugh lines of the show, and Victoria Budonis as Bananas mostly succeeds at being the heart of the production, even as she delivers what is the unrecognized best line of the script when she sees the nuns in her living room and asks Artie if he?s brought home work from the office. Alex Herrald?s Ronnie is properly manic, and Emilie Soffie delivers on the novice nun, and Tom Cleary as Hollywood director Billy Einhorn has the right presence to be the Hollywood success story who has gone beyond the neighborhood. The staging is solid, particularly a manic scene of everyone moving in different directions, literally and figuratively. The sound design supports time and place, as does the set, whose curtained sink cabinet is so emblematic of working-class, Queens, circa 1965 as to make those of us who longed for wooden cabinets smile in recognition. Guare?s deeply disturbing, somewhat self-referential play is full of dated references to which current audiences may not relate Mayor Lindsay, yay, but asks questions about people?s search for meaning and love which most audiences will find timeless. The production brings those questions to the fore, no more than as we leave the theater and go out into the night.

Reviewed by igraceinnyc on Saturday, Sep 19th, 2009