The Gamm Explores Fame & Failure in 'House of Blue Leaves'

The Gamm, a small theatre with a big impact in Pawtucket, RI, will explore fame, success and triumphant failure in their production of John Guare's "The House of Blue Leaves." The show runs from March 5 through April 5, but with less than 150 seats in house, the tickets have been selling fast.

Playwright John Guare earned critical acclaim for this "zany and original farce" about a family from Queens, NY that is so obsessed with celebrity and the American Dream that they cannot connect with one another.

When the play was first produced in 1971 it won both the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Obie Award. Subsequent productions went on to win several Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards and an Obie Award. And Guare went on to write the remarkable "Six Degrees of Separation," which won the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

"Guare has created some of the most memorable oddball characters in modern American drama," said Michael Early and Phillipa Keil of "House of Blue Leaves" in their book 'The Modern Monologue.' "On the surface [the characters] appear to be cartoons. Underneath, however, they reveal needs and wants as great as any tragic hero or heroine of classical drama. "

The play takes place in October of 1965. Artie Shaugnessy, a zoo-keeper from Sunny Side, Queens dreams of moving to Los Angeles with his mistress, Bunny, and becoming a big-time songwriter. Meanwhile his wife, Bananas, is having a mental breakdown.

Artie's son, Ronnie, is AWOL from the Army, stowing a home-made bomb, and planning to blow up the Pope on his first visit to New York City. Also visiting is Artie's old school chum, Billy Einhorn, now a Hollywood producer with industry connections. But will Artie's dreams of fame be swallowed up in the chaos of his ordinary life? Guare's prescient Vietnam-era black comedy about America's obsession with celebrity, revived on Broadway in 2011, is devastatingly hilarious and never timelier than in our age of reality TV.

"Raised Irish Catholic on the East Coast, I felt I understood the Shaughnessy's," says Fred Sullivan Jr., the play's director, "their intense loves and joys, their Greatest Generation nostalgic longings and memories, their mystical devotions and superstitions, their internecine resentments and their impatience with unhappiness, each other and especially mental illness."

"The House of Blue Leaves" runs from March 5 through April 5 at The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (172 Exchange St, Pawtucket RI). For more information and tickets visit www.gammtheatre.org or call 401.723.4266.