![]() ![]() Guare’s play maintains a delicate equilibrium between zaniness and gravity. Pill’s funny-sad ethereal performance exposes the cultivated poise and glamour of Hollywood as another empty fantasy, while the solace of Billy’s connection to his roots depends on those roots remaining undisturbed. In the play’s off-kilter world, God and the Pope are just two more points on the celestial celebrity map. And three nuns from Ridgewood (Mary Beth Hurt, Susan Bennett, Halley Feiffer) climb in through the Shaughnessys’ window to watch the papal coverage on TV. Deaf since an accident on set, the former actress promptly loses her hearing aid and tries to hide her disability. Billy’s girlfriend, Corrinna Stroller (Allison Pill), turns up to visit. Artie and Bananas’ son Ronnie (Christopher Abbott) has gone AWOL from basic training and built a bomb to assassinate the Pope. ![]() The play’s second act careens into farcical chaos. The plan is for Artie to have his catatonic wife, Bananas (Falco), committed, so he and Bunny can move to California where Artie’s old neighborhood pal, famed director Billy Einhorn (Thomas Sadoski), can open doors in Hollywood. As the Vatican motorcade passes through Sunnyside, Queens, en route from the airport, Bunny Flingus (Jennifer Jason Leigh) drags off zookeeper and frustrated songwriter Artie Shaughnessy (Stiller), her upstairs neighbor and lover, to receive a blessing on their union. The action takes place in October 1965, the day of the Pope’s visit to New York to make a plea to the U.N. That makes the aching hunger with which Guare’s characters chase stardom, or access to it, quaint, poignant and ever more pertinent. In this era of instant, talent-optional celebrity, every schmuck with a pushy attitude feels entitled to his or her 15 minutes, mostly aspiring to fame itself, not to any professional excellence as a means to it. When the play was written, fame was still an unattainable fantasy to the average American, conjured through visions of movie stardom and Ed Sullivan Show appearances, or in extreme cases, criminal notoriety. First staged in 1966, this absurdist black comedy has grown perhaps even more corrosive in its twisted view of success, celebrity, religion, marriage and the American Dream. Kaufman famously remarked, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” But Guare’s breakout comic masterwork about losers and dreamers challenges that theory. The play runs at the Walter Kerr Theater through July 23. Their work is all the more admirable given the distancing nature of David Cromer’s unbalanced production, but John Guare’s play remains a strange and wonderful creation more than 40 years after it premiered.
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