Theatre in Review: The House of Blue Leaves (Walter Kerr Theatre)

	Ben Stiller, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Thomas Sadoski. Photo: Joan Marcus

One of the greatest plays of the 1970s, John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves is a magnificently manic-depressive comedy, an edifice of laughter built on a foundation of grief and terror. It's also a notoriously tricky piece to get right. David Cromer's current Broadway revival is more depressive than manic, resulting in an evening that is remarkably sad, often in ways that were not intended.

You can tell something is off in the play's prologue, which introduces us to Artie Shaughnessy - zookeeper, adulterer, and would-be pop songwriter. The living embodiment of flop sweat, we meet him seated at a piano, banging out his catalog, a collection of clinkers that testifies to his enduring lack of talent. (It's amateur night in a local bar, and he's trying out material.) It's a masterstroke of an opener; as he works his way through their derivative melodies and flat-footed lyrics, we learn all we need to know about Artie and his tragically out-of-touch dreams. But for the scene to work, he must be frantically, pathetically trying to sell his songs directly to us, forcing us into an intimacy with him even as we regard him with comic detachment. In doing so, Guare is setting us up for an evening which skids unexpectedly from moments of cruel, farcical laughter to raw expressions of pain. At the Walter Kerr, Cromer has Ben Stiller, who plays Artie, facing upstage, offering a low-voltage medley into a tiny on-stage bank of theatrical lights, while we hear the voices of bar patrons talking and laughing through his performance. Not only does this approach prove disruptive, it also makes the scene seem about five times longer than it is.

Even though the first act is loaded with bizarre twists and comic absurdities, Cromer has staged it as if it were a piece of mid-century Broadway naturalism by the likes of William Inge. Artie, who shares a shabby Queens apartment with his demented wife, Bananas, is desperate to escape to Hollywood, where, he firmly believes, Billy Einhorn, his boyhood friend and now a top film director, will launch him in show business. Coming along with Artie is his mistress, the hard-edged, celebrity-mad Bunny Flingus. It's typical of Guare's cockeyed world that Bunny has no worries about sleeping with Artie, but she's saving her cooking skills for marriage. (They've made a scrapbook of the savory dishes he can expect once the knot is tied.) Meanwhile, Pope Paul VI is making his famous visit to New York and the neighborhood is going crazy. As Bunny notes, "I haven't seen so many people excited since the premiere of Cleopatra."

The action gets wilder and wilder, as the apartment is invaded, by, among others, Billy's girlfriend, a deaf starlet, and a particularly aggressive trio of nuns, desperate to have their pontifical brush with greatness. Hiding out in his bedroom is Ronnie, Artie's psychotically disappointed son, who has gone AWOL from Fort Dix with a plan to deliver a time bomb to the Holy Father.

Clearly, much of the action is broadly cartooned, and, in my view, there's no other way to play it. In Jerry Zaks' superb 1986 staging, John Mahoney, Stockard Channing, and Swoosie Kurtz (as Artie, Bunny, and Bananas) got some of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theatre. Channing's reading of a speech - a savage attack on Bananas rooted in a movie magazine article titled, "My Night of Hell," by Sandra Dee - was painfully hilarious. At the Kerr, Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Bunny) delivers the same speech to a silent house.

The humor is absolutely crucial because The House of Blue Leaves is a play about people whose completely unrealistic dreams of fame drive them to commit stunningly self-destructive acts. Underneath, the mordant, often cruel, laughter is fear - of not being known, of not mattering. There's nothing like this play in American drama; its closest relative probably is Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, with its gallery of nobodies who treat Hollywood stars like the gods on Olympus.

But, under Cromer's guidance, much of Act I unfolds in a morose, low-key fashion, an approach that lets the air out of the play. Members of the cast have commented in interviews that the director, seeking a different approach, instructed them to avoid going for easy laughs. But there's nothing easy about the laughter in The House of Blue Leaves; it's based on madness, coruscating loneliness, and the kind of disappointment that leaves souls permanently distorted.

Ben Stiller has an unusual kinship to the play; his mother, Anne Meara, played Bunny in 1971, and he appeared as Ronnie in 1986. A skilled comic actor in film, here he never finds the character's deeper emotions, especially his corrosive Irish-Catholic guilt. Leigh's Bunny is technically correct -she's got the look, the toughness, and the accent -- but the performance is too small scale and lacking in humor. Neither performance exudes the necessary desperation. Much better is Edie Falco as Bananas; dressed in a faded nightgown, her hair a straggly mess, her face frozen permanently in mask of stunned surprise, she functions as the play's Delphic oracle, offering bits of the bitter truth even as she prowls around on all fours, like the family dog. Her reading of one of the play's key speeches - a crazed fantasy about Bob Hope, Jackie Kennedy, the Pope, and Cardinal Spellman in Times Square, is the closest the production comes to capturing the script's delicate balance of fun and fear. Falco also makes the most of the moment in which Bananas practically unmans Artie by pointing out that the melody of one his songs is lifted in from "White Christmas."

Things pick up a bit in the second act, when reinforcements arrive in the form of several supporting characters who add distinctive jabs of hilarity. These include Mary Beth Hurt as a nun with no social filter and Haley Feiffer as her disenchanted colleague; Alison Pill, riotous as Corinna Stroller, the one-hit film wonder, whose hearing aid is notoriously unreliable; and Thomas Sadoski as Billy, who shows up after Ronnie's bomb goes off prematurely, eliminating several members of the supporting cast.

The production benefits from Scott Pask's severely raked apartment setting, which comes complete with a rooftop and is backed by a translucent sky, which is treated stunningly by Brian MacDevitt's lighting. MacDevitt also provides a number of noirish interior looks which, however, beautiful, add to the downbeat atmosphere. Jane Greenwood, who designed the costumes in 1971, is back again, and her work is beyond reproach. The sound by Fitz Patton and Josh Schmidt is an unusually complex and evocative mix of street sounds, police sirens, explosions, etc.

There may well be more than one way to handle Guare's script, but Cromer's approach, like so many stagings of modern classics, gives the game away, beginning emotionally where the play should end up. In The House of Blue Leaves we should be made dizzy with laughter, then brought up short by dark moment of truth, ending by gasping in shock at the play's horrifying climax. But the way Cromer has staged it, there's no journey to be taken; in a way, the play is over when the curtain goes up. --David Barbour