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| oh, those wacky hijinks |
Clearly there's something wrong with me and my taste in theater, because I hate almost every play I see, and over the course of this blog I've trashed the works of Mac Wellman, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Adam Rapp, Tom Stoppard, Chekov, Strindberg and especially Landford Wilson.
It hasn't been all negative, I've said some positive things about the work of Annie Baker, and I loved FUN HOME (the musical based on the comix of Allison Bechdel) and I love Peter Shaffer's Amadeus.
I am a fan of WAITING FOR GODOT in spite of Beckett having been a misogynnist - his everymen protagonists must never be women, since after all, this is a play about the human condition. I have tickets for tomorrow's performance of the production with Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves.
But I'd say that at best I enjoy only one out of every thirty plays or musicals that I see or read. I like a handful of contemporary plays, plus OUR TOWN and a half-dozen of Shakespeare's best plays: HAMLET, ROMEO & JULIET, KING LEAR, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, AS YOU LIKE IT and HENRY V. And that's pretty much it. It's depressing.
And here we go again.
I follow Tony Kushner's husband on Bluesky - I almost always like his posts because I agree with his political views - so I reflexively clicked the likey for his post about the Kushner-edited collection of the plays of John Guare: "He's one of our most important, funny, and original playwrights."
And then I made the mistake of reading THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. You can read it for free on Archive.org.
The play is over fifty years old but here is a SPOILER ALERT anyway.
I like Britannica's summary of the play: "In 1971 Guare earned critical acclaim for The House of Blue Leaves (filmed for television, 1987), a farce about a zookeeper who murders his insane wife after he fails as a songwriter."
In the Archive.org version of the play the blurbs include one from the leftist magazine The Nation: "full of waggish merriment..."; the Village Voice: "Guare knows there is nothing funnier than the clash between American dreams and the American way of death..."; USA Today: "a woozy, fragile, hilarious little heart-breaker..."
Although I guess you could defend the humor on the basis of it's funny 'cause it's true - men do murder their wives, insane or not, all the time. And when THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES premiered in 1971, domestic violence wasn't considered an important issue.
Of the six women in the play, four are dead by the end: the crazy wife, two nuns and a deaf "aging film starlet." All defective or unavailable for sex, and so not much value for the men. The starlet's boyfriend mourns her for ten minutes before convincing the hero's mistress to fly away with him. The surviving nun rejects celibacy, and so avoids being offed by Guare. The hero's mistress, while an obvious bitch because she refuses to cook on demand, is at least worth raping.
Of course I knew that rape was considered a hoot back in those days, since Bill Cosby was killing it in 1969, with his hi-larious bit about drugging and raping women. But still, I was amazed to read the hero's monologue:
It's kind of funny, a chimpanzee knocked me in the back and kinked my back out of whack and I went to this health club to work it out and in the steam section with all the steam I got lost and I went into this steam room and there was Bunny—yeah, just towels-I mean you could make a movie out of this, it was so romantic— She couldn't see me and she started talking about the weight she had to take off and the food she had to give up and she started talking about duckling with orange sauce and oysters baked with spinach and shrimps baked in the juice of melted sturgeon eyes which caviar comes from—well, you know me and food and I got so excited and the steam's getting thicker and thicker and I ripped off my towel and kind of raped her... and she was quiet for a long time and then she finally said one of the greatest lines of all time.... She said, "There's a man in here."
There's no "kind of" rape - she doesn't even see him until he's raping her. You see, that's why it's so hysterically funny - she realizes "there's a man in here" because she was just raped by one.
The Clive Barnes New York Times review of the premier of THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES in 1971 does not mention the rape. Artie is everyman and we are meant to sympathize with him, because straight white men had it the worst in the middle of the twentieth century:
Artie's troubles are manifold: His mistress won't cook for him, his songs are rejected, his wife is as nutty as a Thurber cartoon, his best friend is as crazy as a Feiffer cartoon, and he is invaded by nuns, two of whom are blown up by his son, who clearly has an unfortunate genetic disposition.
Yet Artie keeps on smiling. He believes that one day he will wake up over the rainbow in Los Angeles and find himself as famous as Bob Hope. He keeps on smilingly right until just before the end.
Mr. Guare has a telling way with the karate chop. His black inversions have a Joe Orton air to them, but his tone is all‐American emanating from a mind riotously littered with the detritus of a civilization, its comic books, its radio serials, its movies, indeed all of its advertisements—to steal and adapt Norman Mailer's phrase for itself.
In his review of the 1986 production, Frank Rich says:
By evening's end, Bananas has actually become one of her husband's animals. Bananas likes animals, she has explained, because they're not famous and because they represent to her the buried feelings that her fit-regulating pills usually restrain. Miss Kurtz's metamorphosis brings the theater to a shocked hush. Her slender hands become paws dancing in the air, her voice trails off into a maimed puppy's whimper. As Bananas nuzzles helplessly against her husband, Mr. Guare's inspired image of the all-American loser acquires a metaphorical force as timeless as West's locusts. Where once there was a woman with stars in her eyes, we see a battered mutt, the forgotten underdog that the bright lights of our national fairy tales always pass by...
Then the all-American everyman puts the mad dog down, like Old Yeller. But the play is no longer quite as funny as it was fifteen years before:
Yet a funny thing has happened to ''Blue Leaves'' ...The play no longer seems all that funny, and it's none the worse for the shift in tone. While some of Mr. Guare's jokes are indeed dated remnants of the 60's, his characters and themes have gained the weight and gravity so lacking in his more pretentious recent plays. Time hasn't healed the wounds described in ''Blue Leaves'' - it's deepened them. One still leaves the theater howling at Mr. Guare's vision of losers at sea in a materialistic culture, but the howls are less of laughter than of pain.
He doesn't mention the rape.
In a recording of that 1986 production by the American Playhouse, now on YoutTube the line "kind of raped her" gets a solid laugh as the character played by Christine Baranski covers her face with her hands. It's extra creepy that it's Frasier's dad confessing to raping Christine Baranski.
A September 2008 review of an Orange County California production entitled ‘House of Blue Leaves’ will leave you blue Paul Hodgins writes:
Almost four decades after it turned its author, John Guare, into a name playwright, “The House of Blue Leaves” seems like both an ossified artifact of the ’60s and creepily relevant to our own troubled times.
I certainly get the "ossified artifact" part, but I'm not sure about the relevance to our own troubled times. Later he says:
In the end, it’s too much – but that, of course, is Guare’s point. The promises, priorities and threats of the modern world have unhinged us, and nobody’s acting sensibly anymore. It’s a warning that’s more urgent now than it was when the play was written.
Why is it "more urgent now?" From what I remember of September 2008, the big issues were the financial crisis and Barack Obama was recently nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president. Neither of those things would seem to have any connection to the issues of this play - but maybe for Hodgins, Obama's nomination was a sign that the whole world had gone insane.
Looking back, it was a blessed time in comparison to the state of our country now.
Hodgins refers to the protagonist of the play as an "everyman" in spite of the protagonist being a rapist, but then again, why not? If Guare wrote a zany farce based on the rape of Gisele Pelicot by a parade of everymen, would it be much different?
Sheila O'Mally, writing about the 2011 production in Politico also fails to mention the rape and is annoyed that the audience does not react the way she feels they should, because in her opinion, if you don't anticipate this humorous farce ending in murder, you are insane:
I felt the audience resisting Ben Stiller (as the hero) in the part. They laughed at everything he said, whether it was funny or not, seeming to need him to be the clown at their birthday party that they expected. Their laughs were insistent, rather than reactive, almost trying to push him where they wanted him to go. In the final harrowing moment, when it becomes clear what Artie is doing, a couple of people around me gasped. This is a good response, obviously, and appropriate, but based on all that had come before, I felt the audience turn on the play in that moment. They had been expecting a Ben Stiller laugh-riot, and instead they were given this? The play is so hilarious that the ending, which any sane person could see coming from a mile away, hurts. Good. It should hurt. But I felt the resentment in that well-dressed crowd. I felt them withhold their approval.
The 2011 review in Vulture by Scott Brown is the only one I have found so far that mentions the rape monologue, but only in passing:
Hovering in the wings is Artie’s ten-clawed climber of a mistress, the fierce Bunny Lingus (Leigh). (Guare, whatever your overall opinion of him, is one of the great moniker-makers of the postmodern stage.) The pair met when Artie “kind of raped her” in a health-club steam room, and since then, she’s been convinced of his indomitable drive, even as his lingering attachment to his invalid wife has her wondering...
To be fair this was still the early days of the #MeToo movement, before Harvey Weinstein made Hollywood and the theater world realize that maybe it's not a good idea to be casual about rape. Damn I am so mad I missed the reading of A PLAY ABOUT DAVID MAMET WRITING ABOUT HARVEY WEINSTEIN back in June. I hope it comes around again soon.
Brown has an epiphany at the end:
This is a furious play, a vicious and ungenerous play, and we should be made to feel that. I got it in gentle waves, but never in hurricane-force slaps. Perhaps it’s just the passage of time: House was written back when the grand promises of the Great Society and Vatican II were decaying even faster than the Star System of Old Hollywood, and no purposeful revolution could cohere or find secure footing. “When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie,” chants Bunny, without rue or irony, in a kind of lullaby. “The famous ones, they’re the real people. We’re the creatures of their dreams.” A line like that ought to galvanize us, the passive patsies out in the gallery. Instead, I felt a gentle perplexity. Sometimes, sitting out there in the dark, watching these famous people mount a case for the violent, oppressive absurdity of fame, I felt like a creature of their dreams. And I wondered, Inception-like: Who needs to wake up? Me or them?
The flip side of all the famous people who have performed the play are all those community theater actors who have performed the play. It's certain that at least some of them dreamed of greater fame than treading the boards at the Playcrafters Barn Theater. Do they feel targeted by the play as it mocks this old old man - 45! - because he still has dreams of something beyond his day job?
In the 2024 review of the Playcrafters Barn Theater production Madeline Dudziak writes:
Maybe Guare’s writing just isn’t particularly funny to me. Perhaps the script, like Banana’s moniker, hasn’t aged well, or the other patrons on Saturday were as confused as I was … but it just wasn’t humorous. Sure, a few good one-liners elicited laughs, but in truth, the show was completely depressing. Honestly, when Landuyt (playing "Billy Einhorn") finally arrives and sobs uncontrollably for a few minutes, it makes perfect sense, because it is all simply sad. Even the asides were woeful. Nearly every character had a moment to chat with the audience to let us in on what was going through their heads – a moment of connection, if you will. These flashes of personal insight into the characters could have shifted the dark tone to one slightly funnier, but they simply reiterated how broken all of these people were.I don’t know what genre I’d lump The House of Blue Leaves into. This production may defy genre altogether, but it’s far from a miss; the entire talented cast performs beautifully, salvaging the sorrowful script, and the set is lovely. The unsettled ending certainly doesn’t clear anything up. But maybe you’re the kind of theatre-goer who doesn’t need closure to your questions.
It's astounding that even in 2024 the rape goes unremarked, as if it is a very minor detail of the story, just an odd little quirk in the protagonist's meet-cute story.
I will be on the lookout for reviews of any future productions of "The House of Blue Leaves." I wonder if they'll leave the rape line in, and if they do, what the critics will say about it.