Irreverence the House of Blue Leaves

The people in John Guare's moving, irreverent farce, which won the 1970 New York Drama Critics Circle prize, are awaiting the arrival of Pope Paul VI in New York City in 1965. Awestruck more by his temporal majesty than his spiritual inspiration, they try to become a part of the pageant by seeing him, seeking a blessing or, in one case, attempting to blow him up. At the same time that the Pope is visiting, Movie Director Billy Einhorn passes through his old neighborhood, and most of the Pope watchers also try to solicit Einhorn's attention; for these hungering egos, any notice, any brush with glory, will do. The upshot is at least four deaths, three shattered romances, one imprisonment, one resignation from a convent and the needless scorching of two Brillo pads.

Guare's satire may seem a bit less fresh and daring than it did 15 years ago, if only because it has spawned so many imitators, but in the joyous and all but flawless revival at Lincoln Center, his jokes break up audiences as dizzyingly as ever. So do the wrenching emotional scenes of a boldly tragicomic plot. At the center is a lovers' triangle: a zookeeper and would-be songwriter, played with ingratiating and ultimately terrifying optimism by John Mahoney; his mistress, pneumatically impersonated by Stockard Channing; and his eerily manic-depressive wife, evoked with simultaneous goofiness and dignity by Swoosie Kurtz in what may be the best performance of the season. Kurtz barks and mewls like a dog, she wanders vacant-eyed like Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, she throws things and lapses into catatonia, all the while comprehending everything that goes on except how to avoid being packed off to the asylum of the title. She too has yearned for celebrity. In what seems a metaphor for the state of all the characters, she can hardly get herself noticed in her own home. W.A.H. III