House of Blue Leaves

The House of Blue Leaves
Poster by James McMullan
Written by	John Guare
Date premiered	1966
Place premiered	Eugene O'Neill Theater Center Waterford, Connecticut
Original language	English
Subject	A zookeeper longs to write songs for the movies as his AWOL son and the Pope arrive in New York City
Genre	Black comedy
Setting	A bar and an apartment in Queens, New York, 1965

The House of Blue Leaves is a play by American playwright John Guare which premiered Off-Broadway in 1971, and was revived in 1986, both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and was again revived on Broadway in 2011. The play won the Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play and the Obie Award for Best American Play in 1971. The play is set in 1965, when Pope Paul VI visited New York City.

The play is set in Sunnyside, Queens in 1965, on the day Pope Paul VI visited New York City. The black comedy focuses on Artie Shaughnessy, a zookeeper who dreams of making it big in Hollywood as a songwriter. Artie wants to take his girlfriend, Bunny with him to Hollywood. His wife Bananas is a schizophrenic destined for the institution that provides the play's title. Their son Ronnie is a GI headed for Vietnam who has gone AWOL. Three nuns are eager to see the pope and end up in Artie's apartment. A political bombing mistakenly occurs in the apartment.

The first act of The House of Blue Leaves was first staged in 1966 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. According to Jane Kathleen Curry, (Assistant Professor of Theater at Wake Forest University) Guare "rewrote the second act many times and attributes part of his difficulty to his lack of technical skill in writing for a large number of characters in a full-length play."

The House of Blue Leaves opened on February 10, 1971 Off-Broadway at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre, where it ran for 337 performances. Directed by Mel Shapiro, the cast included Frank Converse, Harold Gould, Katherine Helmond, William Atherton, and Anne Meara.

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