The House of Blue Leaves is play written by John Guare which premiered February 10, 1971, at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in New York and proceeded to enjoy and initial off-Broadway run of 337 performances. The play was the first in a series of commercial and critical hits for Guare for which he earned the both the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Obie Award for Best American Play. A 1986 Broadway revival also added a Tony Award to its running tally of prestigious honors.
Ironically, perhaps, the decision of Guare’s peers within the New York theatrical community have only served to intensify the still continuing debate over its intrinsic literary merits. Although clearly popular with theatergoers and professionals, critical consensus continues to obstruct its recognition as universally admired.
Even in light of the breakdown of traditional distinctions between genre and mainstreaming of genre-bending works in the years since its premiere, the focus of critical divide remains located in the ability or inability to reconcile events of almost zany comedic antics with an underlying narrative premise that is far more serious-minded. Zealously judgmental, indeed, would be anyone who can find fault with a critical judgment having difficulty working out how an explosion that kills two nuns can be contained within the same play that is constructed upon a conventional plot of characters preparing for the excitement of the Pope on his visit to New York and features at the other extreme the almost sitcom-like antics of a dizzy wife who cooks Brillo pads thinking they are hamburger patties. The play is a contrivance wildly shifting tones that seems ready at any moment and with little warning to turn into a Neil Simon comedy just as easily it might turn into an experimental work of anarchic agit-prop. Critics who get it may be congratulated, but critics who do not should certainly not be maligned. The House of Blue Leaves is recognized by both for the ambitions of its young playwright, but in daring to treat along such thin and sharp edge, it has inevitably opened itself to far greater dependence upon the quality of production than it perhaps should.
In 1987, PBS aired a televised version of the play which was filmed with a live audience at the Plymouth Theater in New York featuring the cast of its Tony-winning revival. Guare would later ensure his everlasting fame by writing Six Degrees of Separation and thus unintentionally ensuring he is always just one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon.
