[NEohioPAL] Review of Beck Center's "The House of Blue Leaves"

[Bob Abelman]

Humor and unhappiness strike a balance in Beck's 'Blue Leaves' 

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review will appear in the News-Herald on 3/29/13

 

 

For the next three weeks, The Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood is offering one-stop shopping for those seeking solace in the desperate lives of others.  

 

Midway through an 8-week run on Beck's small, black box stage is "Next to Normal," a heart-wrenching musical portrait of a family crippled by manic-depression.  Opening this past weekend on its main stage is John Guare's absurdist tragicomedy "The House of Blue Leaves," a manic laugh-fest about a schizophrenic woman and the miserable man who no longer loves her.  

 

"The House of Blue Leaves" is set in Queens, New York in 1965 on the day Pope Paul VI visits NYC.  In the course of this much anticipated event, a series of escalating, increasingly bizarre, and seemingly unrelated incidents occur.  The common theme in all this anarchy is the American obsession with celebrity, grounded in the belief-the desperate hope, really-that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.  

 

At the play's epicenter is Arty Shaughnessy, the unhappily married zookeeper who envisions himself being a famous songwriter with a new wife and a new life.  He is so blind to his own ineptitude that he gets neither.

 

John Simon's New York magazine review of the 1986 Broadway revival of this 1966 play beautifully captured its irreverence.  He noted that the playwright "was able to crossbreed American madcap farce with imported absurdism, as if Ionesco had collaborated with George Abbott."  Eugène Ionesco wrote "The Bald Soprano" and many other 1940s plays that helped define Theater of the Absurd, while George Abbott was director of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and many other broad comedies that served as the laugh track to the 1960s.

 

The trick to effectively staging a show like "The House of Blue Leaves" is walking that fine line between absurdity and broad comedy, so that both pathos and pratfalls stroll hand-in-hand.  

A good production is a collaboration between Ionesco and Abbott, not Abbott and Costello.

 

Although this Beck Center production loses its balance late in the game by tilting toward the titillating, the talented cast under Russ Borski's astute direction delivers a superb show.

 

Robert Ellis is marvelous as Arty.  His greatest achievement is taking a character with little redeeming value and rendering him vulnerable and accessible.  Ellis finds and fathoms all the dark places that lurk between the comedic moments and embraces the gorgeous poetry the playwright uses when his characters reveal their pain.  

 

This is particularly evident in a phone call Arty makes to an old friend, a big-shot Hollywood film maker named Billy Einhorn (a wonderful Todd Hancock).  While rekindling the relationship and conniving his way into a trip to LA that never happens, Ellis manages to provide a palatable undercurrent of longing and desperation.  

 

Carla Petroski does the same as Bunny, Arty's downstairs girlfriend.  She is hilarious but never loses her character's sharp edge and driving hunger for the things Arty's pending fame can supply.

 

Juliette Regnier, as Arty's schizophrenic wife Bananas, is brilliant.  She communicates her character's outlandish delusions with such conviction and creativity-best showcased during a soliloquy about meeting with an unlikely group of celebrities at 42nd Street and Broadway-that the black comedy bubbles to the surface without turning too dark or ominous.  Regnier's Bananas is more tragicomic than pathetic, which makes her particularly intriguing and absolutely endearing.   

 

This production goes slightly askew in Act 2.  Amidst the frenzy surrounding the Pope's visit, all hell breaks loose as Billy Einhorn's girlfriend Corrinna (played too broadly by Christine Tallon) and a gaggle of wayward nuns (played too broadly by Tali Cornblath, Hannah Storch and Patricia Walocko) show up at the door.  At the same time, Arty's anarchist son Ronnie's (Nicholas Chokan) plot to kill the Pope unfolds.  

 

Director Borski, whose prominent funny bone was on display in last year's delightful Cain Park production of "Avenue Q," gives into temptation and goes for the laughs. He gets them, but nudges this precariously balanced production off its hard-earned mark.  Only Regnier's transfixing performance stays the course.

 

Borski's set design can be credited with keeping the production from venturing too far from its true north.  The shabby, cluttered Shaughnessy apartment and Joseph Carmola's oppressive lighting design creates an air of claustrophobia that dampens excessive frivolity as it rises.  And nothing says no escape from the miserable lives lived by the people who populate this play better than the security gate in the living room that keeps Bananas, and the rest of us, from leaving.

 

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence but, in this wild ride of a tragicomedy, the trees have blue leaves and that fence is chain link and impenetrable.   

 

"The House of Blue Leaves" continues through April 21 at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood.    For tickets, which range from $17 to $28, call 216-521-2540 x10 or visit www.beckcenter.org..

     
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