Artie Shaughnessy, played by Julio Vincent Gambuto '00, bounds onto the curtained stage and begins a comical late-night music gig amid catcalls from the audience. After he runs off and the lights go out the audience sits back and relaxes, anticipating a witty comedy and moreof Gambuto's artfully-delivered one-liners. So begins The House of Blue Leaves, the creation of a fast-paced world of kooky reality in which laughter covers the dark edge upon which the characters teeter. The protagonist, an aspiring musician named Artie, seems real enough at the start with his pathetic late-night gigs, nagging girlfriend, and dishevelled apartment, later called "so Norman Rockwell" by a Hollywood starlet (Jordan Berkow '03). But this rough-edged and familiar American scene transitions when Bananas (Catherine Gowl '02), Artie's mentally sick wife, emerges in her nightgown and lives up to her nickname with animal imitations and childlike babbles. From this moment on, the play's central axis shifts away from Artie to revolve around Bananas' zany persona. Even in her silent separation from much of the forward-moving dialogue, this production of Blue Leaves effectively focuses the audience's attention on Bananas, attesting to the artful staging and directing of Jerry Ruiz '00 and, most importantly, the captivating stage presence of Catherine Gowl.

Performing Blue Leaves is a risky venture, as the play depends heavily on the interpretative and dramatic talents of the three lead characters, Artie, Bunny (Emily Knapp '03), and Bananas. Thankfully, these three talented actors succeeded in their complex and difficult roles: Artie and Bunny's normalcy runs smoothly beside Bananas' wild antics. Their exploration of this world of insanity poses a question to the audience: who is truly crazy and is our preconceived idea of sanity reliable? Catherine Gowl masters the play's most challenging role by showing us glimpses of sincerely felt pain and tenderness in the midst of Bananas' outrageous chatter and acrobatics, including watering the flowers on the wall and climbing on and under furniture. Meanwhile, in the "normal real world," her choir-boy son Ronnie (Paul Monteleoni '01) draws laughs as he attempts to bomb the visiting Pope, Bunny withholds her cooking from Artie until their honeymoon while freely dispensing sex, and Artie himself has his wife and girlfriend side by side as he vacillates between tender words and cruelty towards each. The plot has an element of fantastic unreality which leaves one wondering if Bananas is in fact the only sane character in the show. Within this dizzying action the mystery of Bananas' sickness and her underlying personality unfolds as we watch her fondle her husband's discarded jacket and blossom only after his off-handed and infrequent caresses. The lines and body language are in fact so smoothly delivered and genuine that the powerful emotions, hidden among comical repartee, sneak up and surprise the audience. With a well-timed pause and a softening of his voice, Artie's lingering affection for Bananas is believable and touching.

While never leaving the living room set, Blue Leaves climaxes with a bomb explosion, offstage deaths, Ronnie's arrest, and Bunny deserting Artie for the famous Hollywood director Billy (Christian Rolleau '01). Artie and Bananas are left on the couch alone again as the door slams. After so many rapid and fantastic events, the calm and lasting image of husband and wife seems to return the play to its foundation and end the superfluous insanity. Bananas is comforting and quiet as a dejected Artie holds and kisses her-we hold our breath wondering if her illness is cured by the love and attention she has craved all along. But the play that began with such roguish humor does not resolve this question so easily. Instead it ends in an abrupt and surprising sequence too fantastic to be revealed here-a sequence made all the more breath-taking by the beautifully staged chemistry between Gowl and Gambuto. Was the pathetic selfishness of Bunny, Artie, Ronnie and the other characters what we really wish to define as normal and sane, and was Bananas' selfless devotion completely crazy? Each production-in truth each performance-could have posed this question differently and played with it to many extremes, but one leaves the theater feeling fortunate to have witnessed the brilliant interpretation of this particular cast and crew.