House of Blue Leaves” Response Paper

“HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES” RESPONSE PAPER

In a 1991 interview in “The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists”, playwright John Guare said, that if you’re going to be in the theatre, “you only get to be a virgin once.” (Breyer, p. 74). He said that you have to be either naive or primitive, or know as much as you can. In one sense, I wish I was still a virgin when I saw “House of Blue Leaves” staged by the Berkeley Rep. By having studied Guare’s play beforehand, I knew too little or too much and like every audience that lip-synchs Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, I found myself anticipating the plot of the play instead of being surprised and delighted by it. I was jealous of the elderly couple sitting behind me who were confused by the structure of the play, thinking it was over at intermission. And by their delight that it wasn’t over yet. The fat lady had yet to sing.

There is an adage that good art should both surprise and delight the senses. Though much of the surprise was in the actual staging and juxtaposition of character’s dialogues, where delight was most evident was seeing how the director interpreted Guare’s exacting technical and stage directions. The craft and juxtaposition of lines and actions was something that I had trouble with visualizing on the page.

Guare states, “a play isn’t complete until it’s staged. You’ve got to see everything....” (Breyer, p. 81). The play was much funnier live than I had anticipated. Guare, a consummate craftsman, asks: “How do we find the music of the play, so that the audience has...the same response every night?” Guare, whose family heritage includes staunch vaudvillian roots, has the precision of an atomic clock when it comes to timing. Forget Timex. He states that even 30 seconds to change a scene is an eternity in a farce...quick entrances and exits are crucial in order to be able to “deal with the rigors of farce.” (Breyer, p. 75).

Guare is a prankster who affirms that creating a play is to have a relationship with the audience. Though our graying Berkeley audience was far too tame for Artie Shaunessey’s prologue cabaret scene—Artie scolds an already obedient audience—pre-taped chatter conveys the feeling of dis-ease, successfully setting the audience off on the wrong foot for the opening scene I would’ve loved experiencing that broken fourth wall joke first hand, instead of already being queued up for it.

In Guare’s introduction for “Six Degrees of Separation”, he mused over the proximity of a 1986 audience to “The House of Blue Leaves” first premiered in 1965, asking what “made the characters seem even more hungry? Their desperation was the same; [but] the audience’s reaction was more direct.” (“Six Degrees..” p.x). By 1986, Guare considered HBL very much a period piece, revived some 20 years later. World circumstances had changed. Another pope, a very real assassination attempt.—life imitating art. I wondered what to make of the audience’s reception to the play’s 2002 resurrection: does the audience still respond in the same manner?

I would venture that our 2002 audience was a little more reticent in general which could be explained away by a midweek performance, early in the run but the actors also seemed a little low in energy. Jarion Munroe as Artie, a fine, capable actor, seemed a little flat and Rebecca Wisocky did not push the character Bananas to her full potential. She was played a little too realistically for a farce.

There are some brilliant bits and character role reversals in HBL. Bananas, who is clearly intelligent and insane, is the only character who is aware of the truth but is unable to piece it together—except when she realizes Artie’s been stealing melodies.

Bunny, who’s never held a job longer than a season, is sublimely stupid—the pot busily calling every kettle black. I hadn’t anticipated Bunny as voyeur in the apartment, a clever scene. Bananas thinks she’s hearing voices. Banana’s one wish is to be allowed to have an emotion. And feckless untalented, sentimental Artie is incapable of deep emotion—except at the end when he kills Bananas.

I was particularly intrigued with minor character the deaf starlet Corrina in that deafness is a metaphor for the play in that all the characters are deaf to each other anyway. And this is what drives the play. Guare writes: “I like Bunny because she moves the plot, ...you can rely on her to...cut to the chase. I like characters that help the plot along and keep it moving and let us know where we are. “ (Brier, p.84). Not only does Bunny move the plot, but she opportunistically moves on with Billy without batting an eyelash.

When Billy turned out to be real (if shallow as a toilet bowl) in Act Two, I was surprised as the characters’ veracity had been seriously compromised in Act One. I found the transition to Act Two to be a rough transition but Mamet-like, it cuts to the chase. Guare wrote the first scene of HBL in 1965, and in 1966, he read it at the O’Neill Theatre in Connecticut, but he said it took him five years to write the second act. Nine drafts later Guare felt he had develop his craft and work out the logistics of moving nine people around the stage.

However it was clearly a case of Dux et machina to blow up Corinna (and the nuns) like that. (But the offstage Pope was as well...) I loved the parallel structure of how Corinna lost her hearing on the se when a bomb went off. And I loved the way each character broke the fourth wall early on. Everyone wants to be a star. Ronnie’s desire to be the film star Huckleberry Finn, but mistaken for a moron by Billy was classic. Artie’s inappropriate responses when Billy asks for teabags for his eyes, underscores the inappropriate responses throughout the play. Guare is a master in misdirection. And the tidbit we’re left with at the end of the play, Ronnie sent to Rome. I wonder if he’ll succeed?

Guare writes: “the theatre is someplace you go for some degree of truth” (Bryer, p. 83).

Guare emphasized that a play should work on dialogue, not props. Creating a play is a relationship with an audience. Guare said “you’ve got to be aware of everything on that stage, because everything on that stage is going to be called playwriting. ‘ (Breyer, p. 81).

In his preface to “Six Degrees of Separation”, Guare stated: “I realized if I was going to be a writer, I must first trust this unknown work process that goes on within and realize my job as a writer {is to protect} it....writing down everything...[but] cut brutally when you’re working.... It’s not playwrite but playwright—wright as in wheelwright...wright refers to the craft...the method we use to make a new map of the unconscious. (“Six Degrees..” p.5).

Guare knew that playwriting was rightfully his craft from the age of eleven “...so there was always this sense that...it was possible; the theatre was something every possible.” (Breyer, p.71).Guare likens the process of playwriting to piecing together pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls—fragment by fragment. Guare’s muse opens a vein and spills “Black-heart’s truth. ...that’s what the plays are. Insurance that the original wound never goes away, that the original crime is never forgiven, is always about to be performed, and is always in the present tense.” (“Six Degrees..” p.xiii). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Breyer, Jackson R., “The Playwright’s Art” John Guare interview, Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995. 
Guare, John, “The House of Blue Leaves,” (with new preface: Plume Edition), Penguin, 1987. 
Guare, John, “Six Degrees of Separation”, Drapmatists Play Service, Inc. 1992. 

CW 810, #2
Sept. 17, 2002