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Theatre Arts to present “Wickedly Funny” House of Blue Leaves

House of Blue Leaves, a play by John Guare, has won an Obie and four Tonys. Presented by the Department of Theatre Arts beginning Nov. 6, the play has been described as a “wickedly funny” dark comedy about a dysfunctional family that will do anything to be famous. What makes House of Blue Leaves a winner?

Randy Wonzong, Theatre Arts, says House of Blue Leaves has two essential things going for it. First, the show is enormously popular with audiences. Wonzong describes a scene: “A deaf lady enters, her hearing aids blow out, she sets them on a table. A crazy woman enters (whom the deaf lady can’t hear and is startled by), thinks she needs to take more pills to become ‘normal,’ so she eats the hearing aids.” Other characters with a certain je ne sais quoi include beer-imbibing nuns, a wacky nephew, a celebrity uncle from Hollywood, and a woman who scores 12 out of 1,000 points on a Reader’s Digest sex “quiz.”

Second, Wonzong says, the show also has “an important connection with human experience”—commonly felt by theatregoers as “that lump in your throat.” The characters in House may be pathetic, but they are able to move us enough to empathize with them (as well as laugh ’til we cry over their antics, says Wonzong).

New York playwright Guare is also known for his play Six Degrees of

Separation, which was made into a movie in the ’90s.
House of Blue Leaves will run Nov. 6–11 in Wismer Theatre. See calendar for details.