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Sean Power - Reviews & InterviewsThe House of Blue Leaves theater
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| THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES By John Guare. Directed by Harland Meltzer. With John Lenartz, Marion Markham, Cary Barker, and Sean Power. At Colonial Theatre through July 4. |
It's no surprise that playwright John Guare once compared his popular The House of Blue Leaves to a love child of Feydeau and Strindberg. On the one hand you have loopy farce with absurd situations, comical nuns, and fools galore. On the other, you have four people murdered - by a bomb and a strangulation and more self-delusion among the survivors than there are vacant stares in a Bergman retrospective.
A mighty tricky balance. Yet the current Colonial Theatre production keeps the entire tottering contrivance not only upright but humming along as it sways this way into silliness and that way toward tragedy. Director Harland Meltzer keeps a terrific, mostly Equity cast fired up to a frenzy even when they're stock still. The manic intensity or their absurd dreams flaring out like headlights.
The wacky characters are in the black comedy tradition of cultural caricatures so appallingly recognizable that we laugh in defense, to ward off taking them seriously. Zookeeper Artic Shaughnessy (John Lenartz) fancies himself a songwriter, plunking out ditties like "Where's the Devil in Evelyn?" on a piano in his freezing 1965 Queens apartment. His wife, Bananas (Marion Markham), is crazy, frying up Brillo pads to feed him; she recently tried to slash her wrists with spoons. His girlfriend is Bunny Flingus (Cary Barker), who makes up for being a poor, if ready, sex mate by refusing to cook for him till they are married ("We gotta save some magic for the honeymoon"). Son Ronnie Shaughnessy (Sean Power) is an Army AWOL, a homicidal psychopath who aims to blow up the visiting Pope Paul VI in Shea Stadium that afternoon, disguised as an altar boy. In all their eyes, His Holiness has serious competition from household-name Hollywood director Billy Einhorn (Paul Buxton), a boyhood friend of Artie and Bananas, whom Artie sees as his entree to fame and fortune.
Finn, and Ronnie's impromptu, unsought audition is a tour de farce of the sort of illfated self-deception that afflicts just about everyone here. More problematical to portray is Bananas, although Markham gives it her all. For Bananas is a dead serious messenger trying to be heard in the midst of a larf riot, a reminder that if unflinching honesty toward tempting delusions doesn't lead to madness it sure as hell looks crazy in contrast.
Director Meltzer keeps up an effective tension with a frenetic pace that slackens now and then only to be tugged taut. Solid support is given by the main characters. Buxton is an earnest Hollywood mogul as Einhorn, even when he steals Artie's most precious possession and says it's for his own good. Angela Roberts is very funny as Corrina Stroller, Billy's girlfriend; absurd non sequitur dialogue follows when Bananas mistakes the movie starlet's tiny hearing aids for her lithium and swallows them. Even the littlest nun gets an interestingly amiable personality from Kathleen Moore Ambrosini, in a scene of ironic relief when her two companions blow up. Production values are top-notch, from the glum set design of the apartment by Christian Wittwer, to the costumes by Joy Thibodeau and lighting design by Brian Aldous.