Last week in the ’92 Theater Jess Chayes ’07, first-time director, put up her production of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves.” The show had a creative, well-crafted, and sensible set with great performances all around.
The play takes place in 1965 but, like many plays about the American Dream, still feels relevant to today’s world. Since Guare is a master of particulars, the relevance is more than general Americana. Whether she knew it or not, Chayes chose the right script at the right place at the right time.
Artie Shaugnessy (Eddie Brudney ’07) lives in Queens with his mentally ill wife Bananas (Ali Kimmel ’08), who pretends to be various animals and has not left the house, or her nightgown, in six months. He dreams of songwriting fame, and his super-animated girlfriend Bunny (Naomi Ekperigin ’05) insists that he is the next great songwriter. On this night, the Pope is visiting New York to ask the U. N. to stop the Vietnam War- for which Artie and Bananas’ son Ronnie (Chris Krovatin ’07) has been drafted. Will Artie institutionalize Bananas and marry Bunny, or will Bananas win him back? Will he call his childhood friend Billy, now a big-shot Hollywood director, and achieve fame?
Will the Pope bless Artie’s songs? The characters cannot wait to find out. But then they do not know (as the audience does) that Ronnie has already gone AWOL and plans to blow up the Pope. Nuns and starlets later wind up in the apartment, only to get blown up themselves. Billy (Seth Cohen ’07) arrives, and then departs with Bunny, leaving Artie where he started. Just as it seems Artie might reconcile with Bananas, it is suddenly all too much for him. The camel’s back breaks, and Artie, gently, tearfully and lovingly, strangles her to death.
This play is hysterically funny. Not the ending, of course, but there is a sort of naturalistic absurdity to the play that heightens the characters’ struggle to be ‘somebody,’ whether to a husband or a father or an audience or to God or anyone else. There are three cultural forces at work here: Hollywood, the Pope and Vietnam. The three blend subtly; you do not leave the theater thinking the play was solely about any one of them, but together they make a cocktail of national hysteria. These people have no control over the events in their lives and seek frantically for an outlet.
Now, an informal reader poll: Who, as they read this, currently feels unable to affect the course of events that shape their lives- perhaps having lost this sense of mattering in the world, of counting, to war, religion, or a few powerful strangers who are now household names? Raise your hands.
There is helplessness everywhere. Perhaps most people do lead lives of quiet desperation, but sometimes it is not that quiet. And sometimes the noise of our nation’s desperation drowns out the desperation’s source. There is a beauty to the early myth that the Pope could stop the war, but there are no easy outs in the world Guare and Chayes depict.
Billy is this play’s Godot, except he actually shows up and is not quite the deus ex machina Artie was expecting. Cohen’s Billy was totally sincere, believing his flimsy reasons for leaving Artie in the lurch, completely out of tune with anyone’s reality but his own. We like him, but he has no idea how ridiculous he sounds.
Actually, few of the characters realize how ridiculous they sound. The “crazy” ones sound the least ridiculous: Ronnie and Bananas make us sit up, catch our breath, and feel our heart wince. This is a testament to the actors and director as much as anything else: Kimmel’s Bananas avoided too much self-pity or self-mockery, hitting the perfect balance. Krovatin was in little of the show, mostly an intense soliloquy at the top of act two, but his silent appearance at the end of act one was the truly noteworthy part. He made my heart pound without looking up, and then by merely looking up.
The role of Bunny, meanwhile, seems to have been written for Ekperigin. Her stage presence is so thoroughly likable that she is free to make Bunny as horrible as she wants without losing our affection- and Bunny is horrible. She ridicules Bananas to her face, is unabashedly ambitious, and deserts Artie with little hesitation. But she is wonderful. She is simply so directionless in life: she references at least seven different former jobs that she has to put all her eggs in someone else’s basket, whether that someone be Artie, Billy, or an actress in a magazine. She is also the funniest person you will ever meet. Type casting? Perhaps. But effective.
At some points the urgency of the story seemed to flag: we knew that Artie’s songs weren’t much good, and while we knew he wanted to be famous (who doesn’t?) the concept of Billy seemed, at times, like a convenient fantasy rather than a lifeline frantically clung to. But then Bananas would enter the room. Brudney’s interplay with Kimmel brought the audience immediately up to speed on Artie’s crushing emotional life. Bunny and celebrity-lust did to the audience exactly what they did to Artie- made us forget how unfair life can be. But the show is foremost a case study in dreams deferred: like Artie, Ronnie, and so many others, if we allow ourselves to be powerless for too long, we explode.
THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES by John Guare; directed by Jess Chayes ’07; stage manager Jeremy Marks ’07; light design by Jeremy Paul ’05; set design by Marty Schapiro ’08; props by Jeni Morrison ’07; costumes by Amelia Walker ’07, sound design by Chayes.
WITH Eddie Brudney ’07 (ARTIE), Dan Butrymowicz ’07 (WHITE MAN), Seth Cohen ’07 (BILLY), Naomi Ekperigin ’05 (BUNNY), Molly Gaebe ’07 (HEAD NUN), Liz Jones ’05 (SECOND NUN), Ali Kimmel ’08 (BANANAS), Elissa Kozlov ’08 (CORRINNA), Chris Krovatin ’07 (RONNIE), Joe John Sanchez ’07 (THE MP), Hayley Stokar ’07 (LITTLE NUN).
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