As the audience trickled into the theater and before most people could take their seats, the student-run Basement Arts program began their season. Sitting front stage and playing guitar, Arthur Shaughnessy (Ian Lawler) drew from his vast repertoire of 30-second songs in an attempt to dazzle the crowd. As was consistent with the play, Mr. Shaughnessy turned no heads and was met basically with indifference by an audience that had no idea the play had begun.
The Basement Arts production of "The House of Blue Leaves," written by John Guare, however, was certainly a noteworthy performance. Playing in a packed house with the temperature slightly above the comfort level, the company was ripe for a let-down. This was avoided, however, as evidenced in the frequent laughter from the audience.
The story begins on the day of the Pope's visit to New York. Shaughnessy is a zoo keeper who dreams of making it as a songwriter. He is married to a crazy, yet insightful, woman named, appropiately enough, Bananas (Laura Heisler). Living in the apartment below the two of them is Bunny, played by Stacy Mayer, and she serves as Shaughnessy's mistress who keeps him dreaming of things bigger and better.
Ian Lawler as Arthur Shaughnessy had just the right persona for the part. Playing in his first lead-role, Lawler gave Arthur a nervousness and frustrated tenderness that worked smoothly with the other more melodramatic characters.
Bunny, Arthur's mistress played by Stacy Mayer, was one such character. From the moment she stepped on the stage declaring that Arthur had no sense of history till she darted off it on her way to Australia, Mayer had a commanding presence. Obnoxious, loud, brash, arrogant and cruel - Mayer was in touch with all of these with great comic effect.
Laura Heisler gave a gutty and heart-warming performance as Bananas, the crazy and victimized wife of Arthur. Heisler immediately demanded sympathy then laughter as she delicately brought her character back and forth from insanity to insightfulness.
What really set Heisler's performance apart was something completely unscripted. Toward the end of the second act in somewhat of a freak misjudgement of timing, Heisler's hand got crushed by the piano. Her ability to just go on with the show prevented anyone from the audience to notice her injury until after the final bows when she emerged from the dressing room with a bag of ice.
The direction and stage design by Jonathan Berry was, with few exceptions, excellent. For all intents and purposes the set looked convincingly enough like a Queens, N.Y., apartment with odds and ends hapharzardly placed around the set.
The only problems came in the second act when Corrina (Dana Dancho) was revealed to be wearing transistors to aid her hearing. In a scene where she is meant to be looking for them, she scrambles on the floor. As she tries to hide them from the rest of the characters, she eventually puts them in a bottle of pills, which in turn gets swallowed. However, in the performance there were a few times when there was no clear reason why she could not have just put them back in. Indeed, at times Dancho seemed to be waiting for her next cue and just holding them in her hands.
All in all, the supporting performances were solid. Lauren Miller brought the right amount of twisted dorkish appeal to Arthur's son, Ronnie. Especially good was Mark Gmazel as Billy Einhorn, internationally acclaimed director and childhood friend of Arthur. Gmazel balanced the seemingly contradictory directions of incessant crying and emotional disassociation.
With a well-rounded cast and excellent lighting (David Plevan), this difficult play was given a thoroughly enjoyable performance. Much credit is due to Berry for fleshing out the meaty thematic issues of the text - the price of the American Dream and success, in general. Hardly an easy topic to tackle in this day and age of sound bite and rhetoric, and despite the laughter and the cheers, the audience could not help but leave the theater on Saturday night with nervous sense of sobriety.