A Wild Show

It was a wild world out there in 1965, the year John Guare set his “very dark comedy” “The House of Blue Leaves,” which is currently running at the Sherman Playhouse. The Vietnam War was gaining steam and Pope Paul VI was coming to New York to address the United Nations, marking the first papal visit to America.

That wild world, where the old social order is rapidly disintegrating, spills over into the home and life of Artie Shaughnessy (John Fabiani), by day a keeper at the Central Park Zoo and by night an aspiring songwriter. In his “Honeymooners”-like Queens apartment, Artie lives in virtually open sin with his drug-addled, schizophrenic wife Bananas (Keli Solomon) and his long-term mistress Bunny Flingus (Stacy-Lee Frome). Also coming and going is his troubled son Ronnie (Alex Skye Desjardin), an unwilling soldier who is hiding from being sent to ’Nam.

Zookeeper? At the very least, Artie is running a three-ring circus. With biting satire — and with characters frequently breaking the “fourth wall” to address the audience directly — Guare illustrates Artie’s life coming apart at the seams. As much as his target is the war and the corrosiveness of middle-class life, Guare’s sharpest jabs have to do with women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.

Bunny sleeps with Artie at the drop of a hat (or, more accurately, a towel in a steam bath), but refuses to cook for him until he ships Bananas off to an asylum on Long Island — the titular house of blue leaves — and marries her. Between bouts of lucidity, fog and unhinged outbursts, occasionally acting like a dog, Bananas alternately wishes Artie the best with Bunny, berates him for his failures and begs for his forgiveness. Ronnie dresses up in his altar-boy clothes in order to carry out his own unhinged plans.

The men in “Blue Leaves” are emasculated, while the women go for the gusto. In the second act, the point is hilariously driven home when three nuns (Blythe Everett, Judy Sullivan and Jessica Gleason) who have come to see the Pope’s procession somehow end up in Artie’s apartment. They turn out to be the unruliest of all the characters.

By the time Artie’s childhood friend and Hollywood producer Billy Einhorn (Rufus de Rham) and his girlfriend Corrinna Stroller (Erin Shaughnessy) arrive on the scene, all the animals from the metaphorical zoo are on the loose; the play has devolved, like the world around it, into a full-on farce involving soldiers, the nuns, veal, a “man in white,” a bomb and a murder or two.

As Artie, Fabiani paints a compelling portrait of a man whose life is sometimes comically spinning out of control. 

But the night belongs to Bunny. This is a breakout performance for Frome, who last year appeared to good effect in Sherman’s run of “Life with Father.” Here she gets to pull out all the stops in a brash, bewigged and funny performance.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent. Solomon and Desjardin dig deep into their roles, and the decidedly un-pious nuns bring comic relief. Director Katherine Almquist gets good work from everyone, even when wrangling the chaotic and bleak moments of the play’s conclusion.

“The House of Blue Leaves” runs at the Sherman Playhouse in Sherman, Conn., through May 14. For tickets, call 860-354-3622 or go to www.shermanplayers.org.