The House of Blue Leaves images
Amy got a good cast, too, with Michael and Marie playing Artie and Bananas Shaughnessy, Patsy and Zack as the girlfriend and the terrorist son, and Kenyatta as the top nun. Tom, Mary Margaret, Katie, Kirstin, Ben (different Ben) and Ryan gave good performances as well.
At left you see Kirstin, Becky and Ryan painting. Although Amy didn't prepare a formal design for the set, her ideas were definite enough to work with. She needed a box set with four doors and a window and a piano so Artie could play us his crummy songs. And she needed it to go up quickly because we lost a weekend somehow. So we pulled pieces of a dozen old shows (including—through the door on your right—antiwar slogans from a recent Second Stage reading) and got it standing in short time. I'm pretty sure this photo was made late in the second weekend.
Amy must have a magic touch as a director too. While Guare has written every character over the top—come on, this is a script about a songwriting zookeeper, his mentally ill wife, his son who wants to blow up the pope, and his girlfriend who sleeps with him but refuses to cook for him until they're married—the performers kept their focus and didn't fish for the effects. Nice.
I can't help thinking Amy was punishing Artie for something. She selected an ugly mustard color for the walls and, for the floor, a green that reminded me of an industrial concrete sealant. Tom worked his rag-rolling wondrousness on the walls, and we instructed cast and crew members that they must never wipe their shoes before walking on the set (cheaper and faster method of texturing than any amount of drybrush work). So the colors looked dreadful but not uniformly dreadful.
I see that the second picture, taken before a performance, makes the room look clean and maybe even neat. But look more closely: The audience saw the dust buildup and the stained walls and the piles of newspapers and junk and the tables packed with tschotschkes and believed that this place hadn't been cleaned for two years or more. From my seat, it was an effectively sordid room for these rather nasty people.
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Set photos