Movie stars appearing on stage typically make their first entrance to a burst of applause. He’s famous! I know him! the excited audience seems to be saying. But no such welcome greets either Ben Stiller or Edie Falco, now starring on Broadway in The House of Blue Leaves. From the first moment, both so fully inhabit their fictional characters that it’s impossible to consider their outsize fame.
In a play about the shocking lengths we go to for stardom, that’s saying a lot.
Stiller plays Artie Shaughnessy, a New York zookeeper who dreams of moving to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Bunny (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and becoming a songwriter. Meanwhile, his wife Bananas (Falco) is having a breakdown and all of them are rushing out to the street to see the visiting pope—except Artie’s son Ronnie, who is AWOL from the Army and has snuck home, planning to blow up the pope in order to get attention.
The current culture of reality-TV and spotlight-seeking stars has given the play, first performed in 1971, a twist that playwright John Guare insists he never anticipated.
“There’s an eternal present to a play,” says Guare. “Watching it now, I understand why I wrote it.”
“Back then, movie stars were mythical creatures and people said to me, ‘Shoot the pope to get famous? What a kooky idea.’” says Guare. “Then in 1981 I saw a headline that the pope had been shot. Reality intruded on my play in a violent way. It was like a glass wall shattered between the audience and the play, and the laughter changed. Now violence and celebrity are so connected that mass-murderers get their pictures in the newspaper and they’re smiling in their mug shots.”
The current revival, thoughtfully staged by director David Cromer, opens with Artie at the piano, his back to the audience, trying to get noticed above the din at a local amateur night. In the final scene, the blue spotlight he had requested is finally turned on him, he faces the audience full-on and holding an outsized mike, he seems the very image of a do-whatever-it-takes finalist on American Idol.
“The need for celebrity has become even more desperate,” says Guare. “I look at magazines in the supermarket and the stars are people I’ve never heard of. Snooki? Bethany? Reality stars are giving advice and writing books—and celebrities are the real housewives. Now the question is not ‘How can I be Marilyn Monroe?’ but ‘How can I be the person next door?’”
In a few scenes, characters talk directly to the audience, and the night I attended, several people shouted back at the actors and one woman tried to start a dialogue. Proof, perhaps, that in the new celebrity culture, everyone apparently considers themselves part of the show.
“We’ve never had this degree of audience involvement,” admits Guare. “But we love it.”
Shuffling around in a nightgown and cardigan, her long tangled hair covering lifeless eyes, Falco brings tender pathos to the helplessly drugged and dazed Bananas. A nuisance to Artie and Bunny, she is a battered underdog who would prefer to be one of the animals her husband tends.
“I like being an animal because I never heard of a famous animal,” Bananas says, crawling on all fours.
At moments, we see brief flashes of the person she once was, and we believe Artie when he wistfully says, “Sometimes I miss you so much.” But Bananas is standing between Artie and his Hollywood dream and so he is prepared to send her off to an asylum. His childhood friend Billy, now a famous movie director, cares about Bananas and tells Artie that all she needs is love. But she’s not going to get it.
“Our dreams have to be fulfilled,” says Guare. “The categorical imperative of the dream is how it can annihilate love. If the dream isn’t the same for the person we live with, then love gets devoured. Bananas has been driven crazy by Artie’s dream.”
When the pope’s visit is being broadcast, Artie urges Bananas to kiss the screen and ask the pope to make her well—so he can go to California without guilt. The TV is the altar, and all are willing to worship it.
In a moving monologue, Bananas tells a tall tale of having seen Jackie Kennedy, President Johnson, Cardinal Spellman, and Bob Hope all trying to hail cabs one day on different corners of 42nd Street. She picked them up to drive them where they wanted to go—which we assume is her fantasy of being connected to celebrity. But then she explains they went on the Johnny Carson show and humiliated her by turning the experience into a funny story.
Humiliated by being talked about to 30 million people? Snooki would never understand.
“This cast is asking different questions about what is really happening and what we are laughing at,” says Guare. “History has changed the play. The world around has been expanding and feeding it.”
Guare points out that each of the three New York productions of The House of Blue Leaves has included a member of the Stiller family. Ben played the son Ronnie in the 1986 revival, his first break-through acting role. And his mother Anne Meara was Bunny in 1971.
“I have a home movie of Ben at age 5 in an overcoat, suit, and bow tie standing outside the theater, turning the pages of the script and demanding changes,” says Guare. “Little did I know! I was incredibly moved and excited when he said he’d like to come back as Artie. Ben would never take on something he couldn’t do. He has an impressive absence of destructive vanity.”
Guare has a skeptical view of fame. The blue spotlight he turns on Artie at the end reflects the blue leaves of the asylum where Bananas was to go. Guare continued his explorations of celebrity in 1990 with perhaps his most famous play, Six Degrees of Separation. But The House of Blue Leaves is a play for both the age and the ages, an ever-changing entity that has taken on new depth.
“There’s an eternal present to a play,” says Guare. “Watching it now, I understand why I wrote it.”
Janice Kaplan is a television producer and former Editor-in-Chief of Parade magazine. She is the author and co-author of ten novels, including the bestselling Mine Are Spectacular and The Botox Diaries; her most recent is the mystery A Job To Kill For.