With The House of Blue Leaves, Profile Theatre ends a season
of works by playwright John Guare. And the end couldn’t come soon
enough. Guare is an acquired taste, difficult for some audiences to
“get,” and even more difficult for most companies to perform. Done
right, his better plays (of which The House of Blue Leaves is
one) can be amazing. Sadly, a full season of Profile’s attempts has
been grindingly difficult to watch.
Guare writes dark comedies full of over-the-top characters,
hyperbolic rants, and absurd surprises. The House of Blue Leaves is about the conflict of dreams with reality. It features a failed
songwriter who makes a living as a zookeeper, his failed housewife who
is losing her mind, his failed mistress who clings to him for some hope
of a famous future, and their son, a failed soldier who is planning to
blow up the pope. It’s 1965 in Queens, New York, and everyone in the
play is searching for transcendence. Success lies just around the bend,
they convince themselves: If they could just brush elbows with
celebrity they’d be on their way to being the people they want to
be.
Guare’s tarnished vision of the American dream is a dark farce with
direct addresses to the audience and assaults on marriage, family, and
Catholicism. In its original ’60s and ’70s productions, this show was
revolutionary. Guare foreshadowed contemporary obsessions with media
and celebrity, the troubled youth of school shootings, and traditional
religion’s withering sway over our private lives. But by 2008, it’s all
rather run of the mill. To make Guare’s “out there” absurdism work, a
company must fully develop his characters, instead of relying on
one-note cartoons—which is exactly the mistake Profile makes.
Bananas Shaughnessy (Sarah Lucht) and her son Ronnie (Mario Calcagno)
are both played as “crazy,” infantilized and oversimplified to the
point of seeming more retarded than troubled. Artie Shaughnessy (Ted
Roisum) is “disgruntled,” and his girlfriend Bunny (Trisha Todd) is
“brassy.” This season, Profile has consistently failed to grasp nuance
of character and truth of emotion. It’s when Guare’s characters are at
their zaniest that they need to seem the most tangible and human, but
Profile never gets there. The House of Blue Leaves is little
more than two hours of one-note fumbling.