John Guare's The House Of Blue Leaves
By Sheryl Flatow
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
 
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
           “Dreams,” by Langston Hughes
On the first day of rehearsal for John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves , running now through June 2, director J. Barry Lewis shared Langston Hughes’ poem “Dreams” with the cast. “I’m using it as a sort of guideline,” says Lewis. “This is a play about dreams. Our dreams are the stuff of our lives. We carry our dreams carefully so that we don’t lose sight of that which is hoped for, that which is possible. Our lives are about holding fast to our dreams so that we can sometimes endure that which we feel is unendurable. Our dreams and our passions carry us forward at the most difficult times. And what happens when those dreams die? I think that’s what the play is about.”

Guare has said that the play is about “humiliation and the cruelties people inflict on each other.” If these two descriptions make The House of Blue Leaves sound like a dark piece, it is – and it isn’t. It ping-pongs between farce and tragedy, and is as funny as it is heartbreaking.

“One of the biggest challenges is to find the right tone,” says Lewis. “Guare often talks about how life isn’t comedy or tragedy; it’s both at the same time. We’re able to hold a mirror up, and in the reflection we see that which is both absurd and very moving, dark and funny. How we respond depends on how we see. Trying to find that balance is absolutely the key to the success of the work.”

The House of Blue Leaves takes place on October 4, 1965, when Pope Paul VI spent 14 hours in New York City, marking the first visit by a reigning pope to the United States. Millions line the streets to greet him including zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy, a wannabe Hollywood songwriter with big dreams and no discernable talent, who hopes that a papal blessing will help propel him out of Queens, away from his mentally ill wife, Bananas, and into a new life in Los Angeles with Bunny Flingus, his overly optimistic and encouraging girlfriend. Bunny persuades Artie to contact his old friend Billy Einhorn, now a celebrated film director, convinced that Billy will get Artie’s songs into movies. One of the play’s themes is our celebrity-obsessed culture and the outrageous things people will do for a few minutes of fame or notoriety. That includes Artie and Banana’s son, Ronnie, eager to carry out a plan that will bring him infamy. 
The characters are extremely self-involved – no one listens to anyone else – and over-the-top. Although Bananas is the one who might be headed to an institution, most of the characters exhibit some degree of crazy. “The great question is just how crazy is Bananas,” says Lewis. “She’s wacky, but she may be one of the saner people in the play. She loves Artie, and she tells him, ‘I never stood in your way.’ Is she giving him a gift and telling him it’s okay for him to do what he’s got to do? Is she saying all she wants is to be loved? Nothing is clear and easy. She talks about a period of time where they would laugh and life was good. We don’t know what her sickness was, but we know it was severe and complex enough that it changed who she was.” 

Although the play is often farcical and fanciful, it’s grounded in reality. Guare’s impetus for writing The House of Blue Leaves was the pope’s historic visit. The playwright was in Rome on that day, but his parents were among the throng in Queens who saw the pontiff pass by. They later wrote to their son about what that moment meant to them, and after receiving and reading their letter in Cairo, he began writing the play. The piece also includes references to actual places in Queens and elsewhere in New York City. This kind of information was extremely useful to Lewis as he began to investigate the play long before rehearsals began.

“I do a lot of research because I believe that plays are rooted in the particular period and time in which they were written,” he says. “When I understand those dynamics, they truly inform me about how the play was written, why it was written, and what the conceit is about the play. I went back and looked at the headlines and the news reels of the day the pope came to New York, and what was happening in the city was tantamount to hysteria. A million people lined the streets. It was the time of the nuclear arms race, and America and the Soviet Union were both trying to be the first country to get to the moon. We were competing for supremacy. This is an oversimplification, but the pope’s visit was kind of a validation for America.

“Guare’s two biggest hits – this play and Six Degrees of Separation – were inspired by actual events,” Lewis continues. “It was important for him to root his plays in reality. You know the places in this piece. When Bunny talks about going to stand on the corner of 46 th and Queens Boulevard, you look at the map and go, ‘Oh, that’s Cavalry Cemetery.’ When Artie and Billy talk about the fun times they had at Leon and Eddie’s, you locate it on 52 nd Street between 5 th and 6 th . It was one of the most famous clubs. Servicemen went there during World War II and saw burlesque and comics, and you understand how important it was that two young men out of high school would go and spend their time there together. Guare makes reference to these various places for a reason. It’s a road map: when I understand the reason, I better understand who the character is. 
“Here’s another case in point. When they start reminiscing about the past, Bananas says that she loved the Village Barn. And I thought, ‘What was the Village Barn? What does it mean?’ When you do some research, you find it was a nightclub located in a basement on Eighth Avenue. It was well known to adults, who would go and play silly games. They would play musical chairs. They had square dancing every night. There was a performing horse that would be brought in to ‘answer’ questions from an old comic. It was a kind of tomfoolery antithetical to New York. It was a place where people went to relive their youth, and listen to cowboy music and square dance. So, for Bananas, the Village Barn was a release, almost a fantasy world. The guys’ fantasy was Leon and Eddie’s, which was essentially a strip joint. These little things tell me who these people are and what their lives were like. All of this fleshes out the reality of the play. Now, we ultimately let go of all of this, but having the information tells me how I can approach the work.”

The original 1971 Off-Broadway production of The House of Blue Leaves won the Obie Award for Best New American play. A 1986 revival, which starred John Mahoney as Artie, Swoosie Kurtz as Bananas, and Stockard Channing as Bunny, opened Off-Broadway and was such a big hit that it transferred to Broadway. Frank Rich, then the theatre critic for The New York Times , felt a shift in tone between the 1971 and 1986 productions: the latter, he said, was more tragic than funny, while the original was reversed. Lewis believes that in PBD’s production the balance between light and dark is in the eye of the beholder.  
“One of the things that I think is very important is that all of these characters – and I mean this in the technical sense, not in the literal sense – are clowns,” he says. “They are clowns in the style of commedia dell’arte. Clowns are both sad and happy, and a clown can be laughed at when he is sad, as well as when he does pratfalls. It’s the old ‘two sides of the same coin’ and it takes both sides to complete the clown. So, do we think of it more today as a tragedy or a comedy? It has a lot to do with where we are today as society and what we come into the room with. Who knows? I think it could possibly feel more tragic because the characters seem to be stuck, they seem to be caught, they seem to be unable to move forward. Well, are we feeling that today ourselves? Do we feel stuck? Are we unable to feel the forward motion? We’re in a pretty tough time right now. In the end, it depends on who you are and what your perspective is.”
Pictured: J. Barry Lewis, Vanessa Morosco, Bruce Linser, and Elena Maria Garcia
Photos by: Samantha Mighdoll