This fame-obsessed household is chock full o' nuts

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Bunny (Emily Bloom, DC '02) comforts Artie (Nick Bagley, ES '00).

"We are all born mad. Some remain so." So said a character in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as quoted in the program of The House of Blue Leaves. And so we must remind ourselves in order to believe the characters in John Guare's play, directed by Samantha Lazarus, BK '00, being performed in the Afro-American Cultural Center this weekend. This busy production has much to offer—everything from the set to the acting is crowded with things to experience. But to find the very real method in the madness, this production proposes you must be a little mad yourself.

The scene is an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens and the year is 1965. Artie Shaughnessy (Nick Bagley, ES '00) is an aspiring singer, who sums up his situation when he says, "I'm too old to be a young talent." His girlfriend, Bunny Flingus (Emily Bloom, DC '02), lives downstairs but visits often while Artie's mentally unstable wife, Bananas (Ginny Smith, TC '02), walks around the house in her nightgown.

If you think subtlety is at work here, take another look at the characters' names. The relationship between Artie's two women is brutally raw. "You're nobody and you suffer like a nobody," Bunny tells Bananas. Both women, despite their obvious differences, look to the allure of celebrity to save them. Yet Bunny is always speaking of the future while Bananas talks of how things used to be. The ghost of a son, Ronnie (Dan Peterson, DC '02) who's fighting in Vietnam, also haunts the house and its damaged inhabitants.

It all seems simple to Artie—he can commit his wife to a hospital on Long Island, escape to California with Bunny, and meet up with his childhood friend Billy Einhorn (Will Goldsmith, BR '02), now a Hollywood producer, to write songs for movies. That's the setup of the first half of Blue Leaves, but life is never that simple. This life is no exception, especially since there's a second act and a bevy of characters who haven't yet made it onstage.

Reality begins to unravel, posthaste. The set is a veritable swinging door of characters whose interactions veer toward the nonsensical and the unpredictable. Explosives, nuns downing beer, a military policeman, and straitjackets all make appearances in what was once a relatively ordinary living room scene. Key characters appear and disappear in a flash—Billy and the Pope, who is visiting from Rome to speak in Yankee Stadium against Vietnam, both make only cameo appearances. Unfortunately, we don't actually get to meet His Holiness—his onstage presence is limited to the television screen. Billy's girlfriend, a deaf Hollywood star (Elizabeth Prestel, SY '02), also has an all-too-short part before she is, well, blown up. The rest of Blue Leaves is similarly unhinged and flighty.

The House of Blue Leaves' technical lightness brings its acting to the fore, and it is to the cast's credit that everyone convincingly slips into his own unique form of madness. Bloom and Smith play off each other nicely as Artie's opposing women, and Bagley gives Artie's mannerisms and turns at the piano a sympathetic realism that catches the laughter between throat and mouth. Lazarus also nicely matches the play's pace to its present situation.

Blue Leaves directly engages the audience in an attempt to implicate the entire house, and drag us down with its sinking ship. Before the show, upon first entering the theater area, Artie is already there, "performing" on the piano. Later, when speaking to Bunny about how the night went, he says the audience barely clapped. There are other, constant asides to the crowd, and from start to finish it's difficult to predict what any person will say or do. In addition, the set design is such that the audience sits on the floor, literally placing them at the exact level of the scene and giving the impression of being an intimate participant. Being so close to the action makes one acutely aware of the set's small touches. The cluttered living room has careful details such as frames with photographs of the actual characters strewn all over the tables.

At one point in the play, Artie explains the play's title to Bananas, describing the "house" where he is taking her to be treated for her illness. Walking up to it, he says, he saw a tree with blue leaves, which, upon getting closer, he realized were actually birds. They flew away with their strangely beautiful plumage to another tree.

For a suspended moment, this belief makes even blue leaves possible.

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