The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome Read online

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  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES and CHAUCER IN ROME are subject to royalties. Both are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage performing, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

  The stage performance rights in THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES and CHAUCER IN ROME are controlled exclusively by Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. No professional or non-professional performance of either play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the requisite fee. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to R. Andrew Boose, I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY 10017.

  This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom

  in 2011 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  First published in the United States in 2002 by The Overlook Press

  The House of Blue Leaves copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972 by St. Jude Productions, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1996 by John Guare

  Introduction to The House of Blue Leaves copyright © 1982 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Chaucer in Rome copyright © 2002 by John Guare

  Afterword copyright © 2002 by John Guare

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-782-5

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Act One

  Act Two

  CHAUCER IN ROME

  Afterword

  THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES

  INTRODUCTION

  The House of Blue Leaves takes place in Sunnyside, Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City. You have to understand Queens. It was never a borough with its own identity like Brooklyn that people clapped for on quiz shows if you said you came from there. Brooklyn had been a city before it became part of New York, so it always had its own identity. And the Bronx originally had been Jacob Bronck’s farm, which at least gives it something personal, and Staten Island is out there on the way to the sea, and, of course, Manhattan is what people mean when they say New York.

  Queens was built in the twenties in that flush of optimism as a bedroom community for people on their way up who worked in Manhattan but wanted to pretend they had the better things in life until the inevitable break came and they could make the official move to the Scarsdales and the Ryes and the Greenwiches of their dreams, the pay-off that was the birthright of every American. Queens named its communities Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Elmhurst, Woodside, Sunnyside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Astoria (after the Astors, of all people). The builders built the apartment houses in mock Tudor or Gothic or Colonial and then named them The Chateau, The El Dorado, Linsley Hall, the Alhambra. We lived first in The East Gate, then moved to The West Gate, then to Hampton Court. And the lobbies had Chippendale furniture and Aztec fireplaces, and the elevators had roman numerals on the buttons.

  And in the twenties and thirties and forties you’d move there and move out as soon as you could. Your young married days were over, the promotions came. The ads in the magazines were right. Hallelujah. Queens: a comfortable rest stop, a pleasant rung on the ladder of success, a promise we were promised in some secret dream. (The first paid commercial on American radio was Queensboro Management advertising apartments in Jackson Heights in 1922 on WEAF.) And isn’t Manhattan, each day the skyline growing denser and more crenelated, always looming up there in the distance? The elevated subway, the Flushing line, zooms to it, only fourteen minutes from Grand Central Station. Everything you could want you’d find right there in Queens. But the young marrieds become old marrieds, and the children come, but the promotions, the breaks, don’t, and you’re still there in your bedroom community, your life over the bridge in Manhattan, and the fourteen-minute ride becomes longer every day. Why didn’t I get the breaks? I’m right here in the heart of the action, in the bedroom community of the heart of the action, and I live in the El Dorado Apartments and the main street of Jackson Heights has Tudor-topped buildings with pizza slices for sale beneath them and discount radios and discount drugs and discount records and the Chippendale-paneled elevator in my apartment is all carved up with Love To Fuck that no amount of polishing can ever erase. And why do my dreams, which should be the best part of me, why do my dreams, my wants, constantly humiliate me? Why don’t I get the breaks? What happened? I’m hip. I’m hep. I’m a New Yorker. The heart of the action. Just a subway ride to the heart of the action. I want to be part of that skyline. I want to blend into those lights. Hey, dreams, I dreamed you. I’m not something you curb a dog for. New York is where it all is. So why aren’t I here?

  When I was a kid, I wanted to come from Iowa, from New Mexico, to make the final break and leave, say, the flatness of Nebraska and get on that Greyhound and get off that Greyhound at Port Authority and you wave your cardboard suitcase at the sky: I’ll Lick You Yet. How do you run away to your dreams when you’re already there? I never wanted to be any place in my life but New York. How do you get there when you’re there? Fourteen minutes on the Flushing line is a very long distance. And I guess that’s what this play is about more than anything else: humiliation. Everyone in the play is constantly being humiliated by their dreams, their loves, their wants, their best parts. People have criticized the play for being cruel or unfeeling. I don’t think any play from the Oresteia on down has ever reached the cruelty of the smallest moments in our lives, what we have done to others, what others have done to us. I’m not interested so much in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. Chekhov says we must never humiliate one another, and I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.

  This is how the play got written: I went to Saint Joan of Arc Grammar School in Jackson Heights, Queens, from 1944 to 1952 (wildly pre-Berrigan years). The nuns would say, If only we could get to Rome, to have His Holiness touch us, just to see Him, capital H, the Vicar of Christ on Earth—Vicar, V.I.C.A.R., Vicar, in true spelling-bee style. Oh, dear God, help me get to Rome, the capital of Italy, and go to that special little country in the heart of the capital—V.A.T.I.C.A.N.C.I.T.Y.—and touch the Pope. No sisters ever yearned for Mos
cow the way those sisters and their pupils yearned for Rome. And in 1965 I finally got to Rome. Sister Carmela! Do you hear me? I got here! It’s a new Pope, but they’re all the same. Sister Benedict! I’m here! And I looked at the Rome papers, and there on the front page was a picture of the Pope. On Queens Boulevard. I got to Rome on the day a Pope left the Vatican to come to New York for the first time to plead to the United Nations for peace in the world on October 4, 1965. He passed through Queens, because you have to on the way from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. Like the Borough of Queens itself, that’s how much effect the Pope’s pleas for peace had. The Pope’s no loser. Neither is Artie Shaughnessy, whom The House of Blue Leaves is about. They both have big dreams. Lots of possibilities. The Pope’s just into more real estate.

  My parents wrote me about that day that the Pope came to New York and how thrilled they were, and the letter caught up with me in Cairo because I was hitching from Paris to the Sudan. And I started thinking about my parents and me and why was I in Egypt and what was I doing with my life and what were they doing with theirs, and that’s how plays get started. The play is autobiographical in the sense that everything in the play happened in one way or another over a period of years, and some of it happened in dreams and some of it could have happened and some of it, luckily, never happened. But it’s autobiographical all the same. My father worked for the New York Stock Exchange, but he called it a zoo and Artie in the play is a zoo-keeper. The Billy in the play is my mother’s brother, Billy, a monstrous man who was head of casting at MGM from the thirties through the fifties. The Huckleberry Finn episode that begins Act Two is an exact word-for-word reportage of what happened between Billy and me at our first meeting. The play is a blur of many years that pulled together under the umbrella of the Pope’s visit.

  In 1966 I wrote the first act of the play, and, like some bizarre revenge or disapproval, on the day I finished it my father died. The first act was performed at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and I played Artie. The second act came in a rush after that and all the events in that first draft are the same as you’ll find in this version. But in 1966 the steam, the impetus for the play, had gone. I wrote another draft of the second act. Another. A fourth. A fifth. A sixth. A director I had been working with was leading the play into abysmal naturalistic areas with all the traps that a set with a kitchen sink in it can have. I was lost on the play until 1969 in London, when one night at the National Theatre I saw Laurence Olivier do Dance of Death and the next night, still reeling from it, saw him in Charon’s production of A Flea in Her Ear. The savage intensity of the first blended into the maniacal intensity of the second, and somewhere in my head Dance of Death became the same play as A Flea in Her Ear. Why shouldn’t Strindberg and Feydeau get married, at least live together, and The House of Blue Leaves be their child? For years my two favorite shows had been Gypsy and The Homecoming. I think the only play-wrighting rule is that you have to learn your craft so that you can put on stage plays you would like to see. So I threw away all the second acts of the play, started in again, and, for the first time, understood what I wanted.

  Before I was born, just before, my father wrote a song for my mother:

  A stranger’s coming to our house.

  I hope he likes us.

  I hope he stays.

  I hope he doesn’t go away.

  I liked them, loved them, stayed too long, and didn’t go away. This play is for them.

  —JOHN GUARE

  1971

  CHARACTERS

  Artie Shaughnessy

  Ronnie Shaughnessy

  Bunny Flingus

  Bananas Shaughnessy Corrinna Stroller

  Billy Einhorn

  Three nuns

  A military policeman The white man

  A cold apartment in Sunnyside, Queens,

  New York City.

  October 4,1965.

  MUSIC AND LYRICS BY JOHN GUARE

  Warren Lyons and Betty Ann Besch first presented The House of Blue Leaves in New York City on February 10, 1971, at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. The production was directed by Mel Shapiro.

  In 1986, a revival of the play was presented at the Lincoln Center Theater by Gregory Mosher, Director, and Bernard Gersten, Executive Producer. The production opened March 19 at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. It was directed by Jerry Zaks.

  CAST

  ARTIE SHAUGHNESSY John Mahoney

  RONNIE SHAUGHNESSY Ben Stiller

  BUNNY FLINGUS Stockard Channing

  BANANAS SHAUGHNESSY Swoosie Kurtz

  CORRINNA STROLLER Julie Hagerty

  THE HEAD NUN Patricia Falkenhain

  THE SECOND NUN Jane Cecil

  THE LITTLE NUN Ann Talman

  THE MILITARY POLICEMAN Ian Blackman

  THE WHITE MAN Peter J. Downing

  BILLY EINHORN Christopher Walken

  On April 29, 1986, the play transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and on October 14, 1986 to the Plymouth Theater on 45th Street. Christine Baranski took over the role of Bunny. Jack Wallace played Artie. Patricia Clarkson and Faye Grant played Corrinna. Jack Gwaltney assumed the role of Ronnie. Debra Cole played the Little Nun. The understudies were Brian Evers, Kathleen McKiernan, and Melody Somers. The playwright extends a special salute to Danny Aiello, who became Billy Einhorn.

  PROLOGUE

  The stage of the El Dorado Bar & Grill.

  While the house lights are still on, and the audience is still being seated, ARTIE SHAUGHNESSY comes onstage through the curtains, bows, and sits at the upright piano in front of the curtain. He is forty-five years old. He carries sheet music and an opened bottle of beer. He scowls into the wings and then smiles broadly out front.

  ARTIE, out front, nervous: My name is Artie Shaughnessy and I’m going to sing you songs I wrote. I wrote all these songs. Words and the music. Could I have some quiet, please? He sings brightly:

  Back together again,

  Back together again.

  Since we split up

  The skies we lit up Looked all bit up

  Like Fido chewed them,

  But they’re back together again.

  You can say you knew us when

  We were together Now we’re apart,

  Thunder and lightning’s

  Back in my heart,

  And that’s the weather to be

  When you’re back together with me.

  Into the wings: Could you please turn the lights down? A spotlight on me? You promised me a spotlight.

  Out front: I got a ballad I’m singing and you promised me a blue spotlight.

  The house lights remain on. People are still finding their seats.

  ARTIE plunges on into a ballad sentimentally:

  I’m looking for Something,

  I’ve searched everywhere,

  I’m looking for something

  And just when I’m there,

  Whenever I’m near it

  I can see it and hear it,

  I’m almost upon it,

  Then it’s gone.

  It seems I’m looking for Something

  But what can it be?

  I just need a Someone To hold close to me.

  I’ll tell you a secret,

  Please keep it entre nous,

  That Someone

  I thought it was you.

  Out front: Could you please take your seats and listen? I’m going to sing you a song I wrote at work today and I hope you like it as much as I do. He plays and sings:

  Where is the devil in Evelyn?

  What’s it doing in Angela’s eyes?

  Evelyn is heavenly,

  Angela’s in a devil’s disguise.

  I know about the sin in Cynthia

  And the hell in Helen of Troy,

  But where is the devil in Evelyn?

  What’s it doing in Angela’s eyes?

  Oh boy!

  What’s it doing in Angela’s eyes?

  He leaps up from the piano with his sheet musi
c and beer, bows to the audience. Waits for applause. Bows. Waits. Looks. Runs offstage.

  The house lights go down.

  ACT ONE

  The living room of a shabby apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. The room is filled with many lamps and pictures of movie stars and jungle animals.

  Upstage center is a bay window, the only window in the room. Across the opening of the bay is a crisscross-barred folding gate of the kind jewelers draw across the front of their stores at night. Outside the window is a fire escape. A small window in the side of the bay is close enough to the gate to be opened or closed by reaching through the bars.

  It’s late at night and a street lamp beams some light into this dark place through the barred window.

  A piano near the window is covered with hundreds of pieces of sheet music and manuscript paper and beer bottles. A jacket, shirt, and pants—the green uniform of a city employee—are draped over the end of the piano nearest the window.

  ARTIE is asleep on the couch, zipped tightly into a sleeping bag, snoring fitfully and mumbling: Pope Ronnie. Pope Ronnie. Pope Ronald the First. Pope Ronald.

  There is a pullman kitchen with its doors open far stage right.

  There are three other doors in the room: a front door with many bolts on it, and two doors that lead to bedrooms.

  Even though Artie and his family have lived here eighteen years now, there’s still an air of transiency to the room as if they had never unpacked from the time they moved in.

  Somebody’s at the window, climbing down the fire escape. RONNIE, Artie’s eighteen-year-old son, climbs in the window. He gingerly pulls at the folding gate. It’s locked. He stands there for a minute, out of breath.

  He’s a young eighteen. His hair is cropped close and he wears big glasses. He wears a heavy army overcoat and under that a suit of army fatigue clothes.