Uneven but captivating, John Guare’s drama stars Ben Stiller and Edie Falco as a troubled married couple. (joan marcus)
“The House of Blue Leaves” is a roughly stitched patchwork of styles and ideas. The first full-length effort by John Guare (“Six Degrees of Separation”), the 1966 play mixes tones — dark, comic, violent, surrealistic — and serves up crushed dreams and wacky high jinks, Vietnam references and Hollywood jokes. For good measure, it also blows up the fourth wall.
Likewise, this new Broadway revival is all over the map. Ben Stiller, Edie Falco and Jennifer Jason Leigh are uneven in plumbing the depths of their characters’ bizarre love triangle. Director David Cromer (“Our Town”) also struggles with Guare’s peculiar tone — he’s more at ease with the pathos than with the second act’s pitch-black farce.
And yet the show’s choppy unpredictability is fascinating. Cookie-cutter this isn’t.
Stiller plays Artie Shaughnessy, a zookeeper who lives in Queens with the depressive wife he calls Bananas (Falco). Artie is planning to get Bananas institutionalized so he and his girlfriend, Bunny (Leigh), can start anew in LA.
What a sorry trio.
Artie is an aspiring songwriter who dimly realizes he’s “too old to be a young talent.” He met Bunny, a casually cruel know-it-all, in the gym’s steam room. “I ripped off my towel and kind of raped her,” Artie fondly remembers.
Meanwhile, Bananas has enough mind left to know what she’s lost — “Let me have an emotion,” she pleads as Artie tries to force-feed her pills.
Leigh, an expert in high-strung characters, can be like nails on a chalkboard — which is exactly right for Bunny. And Falco is heartbreaking when she suggests the awareness that still flickers in Bananas.
But Stiller, who can’t entirely dim his natural charisma, doesn’t quite convince as a sad sack caught between hope and despondency. We buy Artie’s attraction to the toxic Bunny, but not the complex feelings for Bananas that make his final gesture tragic rather than merely dramatic.
Coincidentally, Stiller made his Broadway debut as Artie’s son, Ronnie, in the 1986 revival. Here, Christopher Abbott doesn’t register much as the unhinged soldier who wants to blow up the pope. He’s the weak link in the otherwise stellar supporting cast, which includes Thomas Sadoski (“Other Desert Cities”) and Alison Pill (“The Miracle Worker”) playing against type, respectively, as a Hollywood director and his glamorous leading lady.
Together, these characters make up Broadway’s most oddball gallery, flailing in a hot mess of a play. But you can’t get them out of your head, and that counts for a lot.