‘House Of Blue Leaves’ Is In Good Hands At Ridgefield Theater Barn

By Julie Stern

RIDGEFIELD — Alfred Hitchcock once said something about how he would like to do a take-off on the Mack Sennett comedies by making a film in which a line of Keystone Kops runs up to an open manhole. As each policeman peers down into the hole, a big hammer bops him on the head and he falls in. But Hitchcock’s twist would have been to have the camera then cut to the bottom of the hole to show a growing heap of bloodied, mangled bodies. That said, Hitchcock is the difference between farce and reality.

John Guare’s wacko sort-of farce, The House of Blue Leaves, started out as an off-Broadway hit in 1971, starring Frank Converse, Katherine Helmond and Anne Meara. Fifteen years later, it won numerous awards in a Broadway revival, with a cast that included Danny Aiello, Ben Stiller, Stockard Channing and Swoosie Kurtz.

In this Vietnam era work, Artie Shaughnessy, a middle-aged (extremely untalented) would-be songwriter who works as an attendant in the Central Park Zoo, is caught between the demands of his obnoxious mistress Bunny (who lives in the apartment downstairs) and his nutcase wife, Bananas.

On the day when the Pope is making a visit to New York, Artie’s apartment is invaded by a strident trio of camera-wielding nuns, desperate to get a closer view of the Pontiff, while his son, Ronnie, AWOL from Fort Dix, is lurking in the bedroom, dressed as an altar boy, and clutching a bomb, with which he plans to blow up the Pope during mass at Yankee Stadium.

Also in the mix is Artie’s boyhood chum, Billy, now a successful Hollywood producer, and Billy’s movie star girlfriend, Corinna, whose hearing aids suffer a disastrous accident.

Do you think this is going to be a laugh riot? Forget about it! The New York renditions of the play garnered its awards because it had so much professional talent on the stage. Now, Ridgefield Theater Barn has gotten impressively fine performances from its cast of amateurs.

There are some funny scenes, and some improbably droll lines, but much of the laughter in the audience was more the nervous kind, that comes from witnessing someone else’s discomfort, and that was because the acting was so good that the pain was palpable.

This was especially true with Rosemary Howard as Bananas. Mental illness is not funny, even if some of its manifestations are in fact, humorous. No matter how demented her behavior — attempting to make hamburgers with Brillo pads instead of chopped meat — or how garish her appearance, we never lose sight of the fact that this is a woman watching her marriage disintegrate, as another woman brazenly appropriates her husband.

Newtowner Will Jeffries, who also directs the production, is equally strong in the role of Artie. Worn down by years of coping with his wife’s madness, and frustrated by his failure to get anyone to listen to his music, he is caught between susceptibility to the flattering attentions of the predatory Bunny, and gruff but reluctant tenderness toward the woman he is planning to abandon.

The third actor who emerges as a complex and damaged individual is Ben Bass, as the boy with a bomb. Mixing his mother’s insanity with his father’s frustrated dreams of glory, his goal in life is to be recognized for something big, before he dies in Vietnam.

Even the other players whose characters might not rise above the level of caricature manage to invest their oddball roles with unexpected believability: Paulette Layton as Bunny Flingus, Craig David Rosen as Billy Einhorn, Lynn Carbino as Corinna Stroller (who keeps saying the wrong thing because her hearing aids were swallowed by Bananas), and Rita Schaffer, Kay Mayr and Nikki Siclare as the trio of nuns.

Paul Losacco and Tim Cronin round out the cast in minor parts as an MP pursuing the errant soldier and the man from the looney bin come to collect Mrs Shaughnessy.

It’s a strange play. In the end, as I said, it’s more about pain than laughter, although the laughter is there.