BLUE LEAVES

posted by James Reel

    Maybe I’m an absent blogger these days, but I do still drag myself out to review plays. Here’s the beginning of the latest effort in the Tucson Weekly:

    The older John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves gets, the less funny it seems.
    Around 1970, it started out as a black comedy, emphasis on the comedy, about a dysfunctional Queens household on the day the pope came to New York in 1965. When the Arizona Theatre Company mounted it in the 1980s, as part of its challenging (and, the fearful claimed, alienating) 21st-anniversary season, the emphasis fell a bit more upon the black than the comedy, although it still provided its share of laughs.
    Right now, in the Catalina Players' production, The House of Blue Leaves is seeming less like a comedy than like a bitter fantasy bordering on the surreal, populated by characters who are every bit as troubling as they are amusing.