The House of Blue Leaves Is a Quirky Comedy
By Prize-Winning Playwright John Guare
By Robert W. McDowell
Triangle Theater Review
E-mail: RobertM748@aol.com
Raleigh Little Theatre will present The House of Blue Leaves, a quirky 1971 comedy by prize-winning American playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation), March 9-11, 15-18, and 22-25 in its Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre. Long-time RLT artistic director Haskell Fitz-Simons will stage the show, which made its Off-Broadway debut on Feb. 10, 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theater, where it played for 337 performances and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of 1971.
The Lincoln Center Theater’s 1986 Off-Broadway revival of The House of Blue Leaves opened March 19th at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, where it played through April 20th. On April 29, 1986, the show finally made its Broadway debut at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. It transferred to the Plymouth Theatre on Oct. 14th, and eventually racked up 398 total performances and received nominations for seven 1986 Tony Awards®, including Best Play. The show won three Tonys: for Best Direction of a Play (Jerry Zaks), Best Featured Actor in a Play (John Mahoney as Artie Shaughnessy), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Swoosie Kurtz as Bananas Shaughnessy), and Scenic Design (Tony Walton).
“I’ve never worked on [The House of Blue Leaves] before,” says RLT director Haskell Fitz-Simons. “I saw the revival back in 1986 with John Mahoney, Swoozie Kurtz, Christine Baransky [as Bunny Flingus], and little bitty Ben Stiller [as Ronnie Shaughnessy].… It pretty much knocked me out of the water.”
So, Fitz-Simons made a pitch to the RLT staff and the play reading committee, which was just not ready to do it. He finally got the green light to stage The House of Blue Leaves during the community theater’s 2006-07 season.
“One of the things that I find most interesting about The House of Blue Leaves,” says Fitz-Simons, “is the mixing of styles. It’s written as a farce, but it has such compelling tragic elements. To find those two kinds of styles juxtaposed is unique and, of course, the writing is just gorgeous.
“Mr. Guare has such an ear for the real word,” Fitz-Simons says. “There are so many amazing monologues. You might call [The House of Blue Leaves] a play of monologues, strung together with a little plot. I think it’s just a little masterpiece of theater. It is disturbing. The end is kind of a shocker, and I guess we shouldn’t go into that. But it’s not as bad as Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s not gratuitous, and it is stylized.”
Fitz-Simons notes, “The play takes place on the eve of Oct. 4, 1964. That’s the day before Pope Paul VI came to New York City. [The House of Blue Leaves] takes place in the apartment of Artie Shaughnessy [Rob Jenkins].
“As the play starts,” Fitz-Simons says, “we see a shadowy figure break through the bars and into the apartment. We find out later that that figure is Artie’s son Ronnie [Timothy Riordan], who has gone AWOL from the Army.”
He adds, “The whole first act is basically between the three characters of Artie; his downstairs girlfriend Bunny Flingus [Sandi Sullivan], who is celebrity-struck about the possibility of seeing the Pope; and Artie’s wife, Bananas Shaughnessy [Amy Flynn], who is completely bananas. Bunny is up at four o’clock in the morning, which is when the play starts, trying to find a good place of the street to watch the Pope go by.”
Fitz-Simons, “Bananas has gone nuts and thinks she’s an animal, usually a dog; and she has hallucinations where she sees all of her energy flying out through her fingernails.
“As is often the case with mad people on stage, or in literature in general,” Fitz-Simons says, “Bananas is one of the wisest people in the show, one of the most astute observers. She sees things more clearly.”
He adds, “The first act ends with [Artie, Bunny, and Bananas] going off to see the Pope and young Ronnie coming out of the bedroom with an ominous box. At the start of the second act, he assembles a bomb. He is mad, and angry. He has come home to blow up the Pope.
“Of course,” Fitz-Simons explains, “the driving force of the plot is Artie’s desire to become a songwriter, and Artie writes what can charitably be called pleasant little lounge ballads—nothing spectacular. In fact, I think Mr. Guare wrote the [ballads] in the show.”
Nevertheless, Fitz-Simons says, “Bunny is pushing Artie to take advantage of a childhood buddy, Billy Einhorn [Shawn Smith], to further his career. Billy is now a big Hollywood film producer and director.
“So, when [Artie, Bunny, and Bananas] go out to see the Pope,” says Fitz-Simons, “Bunny makes Artie take his music to get blessed, so they can further their chances of making the move to Hollywood.
Then, says Fitz-Simons, “The second act quickly dissolves into a three-ring circus, with all sorts of farcical additions. Three nuns [Head Nun: Susan Burcham, Second Nun: Jessica Smith, and Little Nun: Kerry Sullivan], who’ve been trying to see the Pope from the roof [of Artie’s apartment building], come down and try to see the Pope on Artie’s TV. Billy’s current girlfriend, the very famous and immediately recognizable movie star Corinna Stoller [Elizabeth Barfoot], drops by.
“Suffice it to say,” Fitz-Simons says, “that there are some farcical chases and lots of door slamming, running around, jumping over couches, and throwing bombs around. It’s like a Marx Brothers film, only the bomb is real; and it does explode, killing real people ….”
The RLT cast for The House of Blue Leaves also includes David Meyers as an MP and Patrick Berry as the Man in White. In addition to director Haskell Fitz-Simons, the show’s creative team includes assistant to the director Sue Scarborough, technical director and scenic designer Roger Bridges, lighting designer Rick Young, costume designer Su-Jung Lee, properties masters Jim Bates and Michael Teleoglou, sound designer Becca Easley, and stage manager Elaine Petrone.
Fitz-Simons says, “The set is Artie’s flat in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. It is primitive, to say the least. These are blue-collar people. Artie’s real job is zookeeper. So, their economic situation is low on the food chain.
He adds, “We go through some changes [in lighting over the course of a day]…. We start at four in the morning—before the sun rises—and we end up at 10 or 11 at night. There’s a big window at the back of the set where we get to see all of that happens.
“A lot of times,” says Fitz-Simons, “these monologues take us to specific places in these characters’ psyches, and we hope that the lighting will help focus that—and help get us there.”
He notes, “We’ve had fun researching and finding costumes from the mid-1960s. For the most part, they’re not flamboyant. Bunny and Corinna are the only ones with a flair for fashion, but Corinna has taste and Bunny does not.”
RLT director Haskell Fitz-Simons says, “Six Degrees of Separation is probably Mr. Guare’s most recognizable text, because it was made into a movie. But I think The House of Blue Leaves is his most important script.”
Fitz-Simons adds, “The biggest challenge [in staging The House of Blue Leaves for RLT] is walking that tightrope between farce and tragedy, and finding a coherent place in the middle. [The play] is very, very funny; and it’s very, very serious; and the styles [of farce and tragedy] aren’t traditionally compatible. The characters [in The House of Blue Leaves] are unusually complex, because of the nature of the play. You’ve got to have expert performers which, luckily, we do.”
Raleigh Little Theatre presents The House of Blue Leaves Friday-Saturday, March 9-10, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, March 11, at 3 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday, March 15-17 and 22-24, at 8 p.m.; and Sunday, March 18 and 25, at 3 p.m. in RLT’s Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre, 301 Pogue St., Raleigh, North Carolina. $15 Thursday, Friday, and Sunday ($13 students and seniors 62+) and $17 Saturday, except $10 March 11th. 919/821-3111 or click here. Note 1: All shows are wheelchair accessible, and assistive listening devices are available for all shows. Note 2: Arts Access, Inc. of Raleigh (http://www.artsaccessinc.org/) will audio describe the March 11th performance. Raleigh Little Theatre: http://www.raleighlittletheatre.org/performances/blueleaves.html. Internet Broadway Database: http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=4525. Internet Movie Database (1987 TV movie): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093222/.
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