REVIEW: ‘The House of Blue Leaves’ leaves everything to be desired

Edie Falco gets bananas, Ben Stiller goes to pieces and Jennifer Jason Leigh bombs in a dull revival

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Three totally different performance styles can be observed among the leads in the disappointing Broadway revival of “The House of Blue Leaves”:

Edie Falco portrays a sweetly deranged soul with low-keyed theatrical realism. Ben Stiller depicts Falco’s discontented husband in patchy moment-by-moment flashes that might be termed movie acting. And in the plum role of Stiller’s zany mistress, Jennifer Jason Leigh does not act at all.

Such a disparity in style sadly undermines the wan production that opened Monday at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Director David Cromer has done notably well in recent seasons by “Our Town” and the short-lived “Brighton Beach Memoirs” revival, but he fails to realize the great potential of John Guare’s sorrowfully absurd comedy.

First presented off-Broadway in 1970 (Stiller’s mom, Anne Meara, originated the character that Leigh does nothing with here) and later given a memorable Lincoln Center Theater production in 1986 (in which Stiller played the role of his present character’s son), “The House of Blue Leaves” is a lovely play about muddled American values that deserves better than this sorry revival.

Exploding in a disorderly apartment in Queens on a monumental day when the Pope visited New York in 1965, the story centers on middle-aged Artie (Stiller), a zookeeper and would-be songwriter who yearns for show biz success. Other nobodies dreaming -- or hallucinating -- about becoming rich and/or famous are Artie’s schizophrenic wife Bananas (Falco), his madcap girlfriend Bunny (Leigh) and his Army inductee son Ronnie (Christopher Abbott), who intends to blow up the pontiff with a homemade bomb.

The playwright weaves this surprisingly thoughtful comedy with glorious monologues and frenzies of farcical action, complete with a wacky trio of suburban nuns, a Hollywood mogul (Thomas Sadoski) and a deaf starlet (Alison Pill).

Unfortunately, the three leading actors obviously do not share a common performance language. Even worse for this production is that the character of Bunny verbally sets up the scene, mood and intentions for the entire play (“When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie.”) and Leigh’s monotonous, vocally flat delivery of Bunny’s opening arias gets the play off to a sluggish start.

The second act improves somewhat, but Guare’s lyrical craziness never satisfactorily achieves warp speed. Falco’s plaintive Bananas is wistful and touching, but the charmless Stiller’s spotty performance emphasizes Artie’s desperation over his dreamier qualities. As for the ineffectual Leigh, well, let’s only hope that whatever she wasn’t doing up there represented just a terrible off night for her.

An unnecessarily gloomy setting by Scott Pask – thick, woolly, Van Gogh-like thunderclouds hanging over everything – does not visually contrast the apartment’s bleak reality against the brighter possibilities of the greater world. The eminent Jane Greenwood, who costumed the original production, dresses the actors in clothes unerringly befitting their characters.

Newcomers to “The House of Blue Leaves” are unlikely to see beyond Cromer’s misguided staging to appreciate the play itself while people who know and love it are advised to skip this unworthy occasion.

“The House of Blue Leaves” continues through July 9 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St., New York. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.houseofblueleaves.com.