481 CHRONICLESnthey love me?”nOn the subject of sanity versus insanity,nGuare is—and therefore wenare—far more sympathetic with Bananas.nIn all of his works, Guarenfocuses on paradoxes and regards themnfrequently by inverting our expectations.nIn Bosoms and Neglect, for example,nScooper tells Deidre, his newn”girlfriend,” that “you become sanernmuch quicker than you go mad.”nAlthough Bananas is the certifiablenlooney who is about to be carted off tonthe eponymous House of Blue Leaves,naccording to Guare’s subtext. Bananasnis the sanest character of the bunch,nwhile all those who pass through Artie’snapartment are the real residents ofnthis peculiar, poignant House of BluenLeaes: Bunny Flingus, Artie’s downstairsnneighbor, with whom he’s havingnwild and frequent sex but whonrefuses to cook for him until they getnmarried (“My cooking is the only thingnI got to lure you on with and hold ounwith. Artie, we got to keep some magicnfor the honeymoon”); Artie and Banana’snson, Ronnie, who has gonenAWOL from Fort Dix in order to carrynout his plan to assassinate the Popenduring his isit to New York to pleadnfor an end to the war (Bunny shows upnnear the end of Act I with a large “InLoe Paul” button: “They ran out ofnWelcome Pope buttons so I ran downstairsnand got my leftover from whennthe Beatles were here!”); Billy Einhorn,nArtie’s childhood pal who is nowna successful Hollywood producer; andnCorrinna Stroller, Billy’s concubinenactress who went deaf during an accidentnon the set.nSuperficially, The House of BluenLeaves is an updated version of Arsenfcnand Old Lace or You Can’t Take ItnWith You or that genre of theatricalncomedy which has prompted morenthan one critic to liken Guare tonGeorge Abbott. But as Frank Rich hasnclaimed, “At its best [The House ofnBlue Leaves] often seems like The Daynof the Locust as rewritten by TennesseenWilliams.”nBeneath the laugh-riot chaos, eachnof the inmates of Guare’s Blue Leavesnasylum is lovable and ostensibly harmless.nAnd lest it seem like the dismissablenblack comedy it ultimately provesnto be, Guare weaves a theme into thenshenanigans, a message about the motivationnto be recognized, the ambitionnto be famous. It appears early, whennBunny says in one of the more memorablenlines, “When famous people gonto sleep at night, it’s us they dream of,nArtie. The famous ones—they’re thenreal people. We’re the creatures ofntheir dreams. You’re the dream. I’mnthe dream. We have to be there for thenPope’s dream.” It reappears later as thenpiotal cause of Banana’s breakdown.nFor Artie, it serves as his raison d’etre.nBut it’s Billy who has the final say onnthe matter, in a reersal of logic whichntypifies all of Guare’s work: “Bananas,ndo ou know what the greatest talent innthe world is? To be an audience. Anybodyncan create. But to be an audiencen… be an audience …”nThe House of Blue Leaves finally isnboth more and less than Guare’s homagento the Common Man. Its limitationnis that a mere 15 years after it wasnwritten, it already seems dated by itsnrelentiess references to a specific era, ifnnot to the sentiment that seemed peculiarnto that era. Een Ronnie’s assassinationnplot attaches the work to thatnsame three-year period that spawnednTaxi Driver and Nashville and countlessnother vehicles that bore a manufacturednself-importance for dwellingnon so “relevant” a topic. While it isnhard to imagine a more effective Bananasnthan Swoosie Kurtz, the morenenduring qualities that Guare mightnhave achieved in this work are nowndwarfed by the distance from which wenhave to iew the entire enterprise. Ournperspective is now that of an anthropologistnobser’ing a foreign culturen—in this case, our own recent past.nIn fact, one of the more consistent,nif less pronounced, themes in Guare’snwork revolves around the past and hownit is glorified and romanticized as anway of avoiding a less than satisfactorynpresent. Guare himself is obsessednwith the past, either as a retreat or asnan inevitability, a shelter or an inescapablensource informing the present. InnBosoms and Neglect, a mother tells hern(obiously autobiographical) son, “I’mnthis old woman who does not want tonlive in the past and I have this son whonis like living in a time capsule. Theyncall it the past because it’s oer with,ndone, passed. Bury him with his copynof Gone With the Wind.” {Bosoms andnNeglect had a mere four-day run whennit opened on Broadway in 1979, but itndeser’ed far wider attention. As RossnnnWetzsteon claims in his 1982 profilenon Guare for New York Magazine,n”Although it ran only four days onnBroadway, a hundred thousand peoplenclaim to have seen it, one of thosensmash hits everywhere but at the boxnoffice.”)nUnfortunately, it was far from an”smash hit” with the critics. Even thenmore modest but outstanding Off-Off-nBroadwa}’ revival of the work this pastnspring, in the midst of what can beniewed as a Guare renaissance, wasnsurprisingly ignored or renounced as anfailure for what was percei’ed as annunresolved incongruitv betw’een Acts Inand II.nThe reference to Gone With thenWind indirectly confirms the suspicionnof autobiography even as it prefiguresnand alludes to Guare’s most ambitiousnproject to date—his great dramaticnepic, a trilogy of plays, depictingnAmerica’s moral e’olution and deteriorationnfollowing the Giil War, ButnGuare’s grand opus has vet to be seennin the perspective• for which it wasnintended. In Gardenia, Lydie Breeze,nand most recently Women and Water,nGuare conceived of a late-19thcentury,nself-contained Utopian communitynthat was undermined by itsnnaivete, its innocence, and its inherentncorruption. The most powerfulnand influential force in these plays isnnot the set of ideals which broughtnthese figures together before we meetnthem, rather the past, which becomesna series of somewhat mysterious andnimpulsive events that victimize thencharacters in the present.nIn Lydie Breeze the year is 1895,nand we’re on Nantucket, where theirnAipotu (“Utopia backwards”) has beennestablished. While one character exclaimsnthat “the curtain is about to gonup on a new century,” a key figure innforming their glorious community isnalready bemoaning its dissolution,n”We came here after the [Givil] War.nYou thought Walden was a dream?nWalden was a Buffalo Bill Wild WestnShow compared to the austere moralnsplendor of our model community.”nAs a riietaphor for the infection thatnwould prove the undoing of his hypotheticalncommunity, Guare introducedna rampant strain of syphilis.nSyphilis courses through these playsneven as it connects the various charactersnand serves as the communitv’sn