The House of Blue Leaves
The renovated Mark Taper Forum reopens with Nicholas Martin's less-than-exciting revival of John Guare's off-kilter comedy.
(© Craig Schwartz)
However, after Artie Shaughnessy (John Pankow), a zookeeper and aspiring songwriter, sits at the piano, warbles a few ditties to his El Dorado audience and downs the beer he had to pay for himself, we finally see what's really behind the curtain. As it rises, the platform pulls back and settles into place in Artie's chilly apartment in Sunnyside, Queens (impeccably designed by David Korins).
It's October 4, 1965, and The Pope is passing through Queens on his way to Manhattan to implore the United Nations to bring peace to the world. Meanwhile, Artie is dreaming of peace in his life. He longs to find success with his hopelessly mediocre songs, put his crazy wife, Bananas (Kate Burton), in a lovely rest home, and live a happily-ever-after life with his girlfriend and downstairs neighbor, Bunny (Jane Kaczmarek). It ain't gonna happen.
Without question, Blue Leaves is not an easy show to do, and this amalgam of dreams, desperation, and dark comedy needs a lighter touch than Martin's to get this topsy-turvy world just right. That's not to say that he and his cast don't try really hard to present an entertaining show; but instead of effervescent and off-kilter, we get ponderous and effortful.
Act II has its own specific problems. A pandemonic sequence with a group of visiting nuns (Rusty Schwimmer, Mary Kay Wulf, Angela Goethals), an M.P. (James B. Harnagel), Artie, and his bomb-toting son, Ronnie (James Immekus) not only lacks the necessary escalation of tensions and emotions, but the choreography is patently obvious and rehearsal-like. And when Artie's old friend Billy (Diedrich Bader) shows up, a transition in relationships flies by virtually unnoticed.
As for the actors, Kaczmarek, who isn't naturally well suited to her role, is furthest off the mark. Her Bunny feels too solid, too grounded in normalcy to be comfortable in the fanciful, swirling, eccentric world of a Guare play. Burton gives the surest performance of anyone, but since Bananas is off in her own world anyway, she has a bit of a blue bubble for protection. Pankow lands somewhere in the middle of the two, but still comes across like a good actor stuck in the wrong show.