The House of Blue Leaves

It's an acting litmus test: If an actor puts a phone to his ear, does the audience believe somebody's on the other end? In Guare's 1971 dark comedy, Artie Shaughnessy (McDade), a middle-age zookeeper trapped in Queens but dreaming of life as a Hollywood songwriter, calls up his old pal, Billy Einhorn, now a hot-shot movie producer. It all comes out of him: Artie's lonely marriage to the aptly named Bananas, his new romance with the offbeat Bunny and his desperate wish to get to L.A. But McDade's hurried delivery, as he jumps over any pauses when his friend responds, sums up a bigger glitch: Filmer's cast speaks its lines without really listening to them.

The difficulty of Leaves is its competing tones. Both distressingly absurd and laughably sad, Guare's landmark quirky comedy is just a skewed version of a serious drama. Yet this Artie is only small-time pitiful, not big-time wretched; Reiter's Bananas seems so clear-headed that her lost-marbles manner comes off like a put-on, while Niccolai as Bunny substitutes a New Yawk accent for in-depth character study. The thing is, if you miss Guare's poignant sense that genuine emotional struggles undergird the bizarre plot twists, then the outlandish elements—like Artie's psychotic son who comes to blow up the Pope during his U.S. tour—are just silly, without resonance. In Guare, it's a two-way connection between humor and pathos, but Filmer's stilted, unfunny comedy just keeps jabbering into the phone, as if tragedy had nothing to say.—Novid Parsi