Dream 'House'

GROPING for a comfortable moral in John Guare's classic black comedy "The House of Blue Leaves," which opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum in a sensational revival directed by Nicholas Martin, is a little like asking an escaped felon for some friendly advice. But one thing can safely be said: When it comes to trampling traditional family values, there's nothing more brutalizing than a middle-aged guy with a frustrated dream.

Artie Shaughnessy (a pitch-perfect John Pankow) would like to be a man who needs no introduction, but this is precisely his problem. A zookeeper from Queens with a crazy wife and a sociopathic son in the military, he's an outer-borough nobody who's desperate to be a songwriting somebody -- preferably in Hollywood with his mistress, Bunny (Jane Kaczmarek, in riotous form), the floozy from downstairs who's pulling out all the stops to get him to believe in a fantasy future.

Bananas (an affecting Kate Burton), Artie's better half, wanders around their cramped apartment in a housedress and cardigan, emotionally anesthetized by pills yet self-aware enough to realize that her life has become a shipwreck. For a woman who's about to be carted off to the funny farm, she's arguably the sanest person of the lot.

But the bar is set pretty low when you consider the crowd that assembles at her home to see the pope, who's motorcading into town later that day. In dizzying screwball fashion, the play gathers together a trio of beer-chugging nuns (headed by Rusty Schwimmer), a deaf starlet named Corrinna Stroller (lovely Mia Barron) and Artie and Bananas' troubled kid, Ronnie (James Immekus), who's gone AWOL and is carrying an explosive surprise for the pontiff.

Set in the Vietnam-escalating year of 1965 in a neighborhood that's just a short subway trip from the "All in the Family" gang, "The House of Blue Leaves" might seem like an odd choice to inaugurate the reopening of the Taper after its technical- and comfort-enhancing $30-million spruce-up. Wouldn't a freshly harvested homegrown work have been a more exciting way for artistic director Michael Ritchie to commence this next chapter of a theater that has such a storied track record of producing new writing?

That was my thinking going in, but this production is so revitalizing that Guare's ruthless farce seems to be not just speaking directly to our age but mirroring its most pervasive pathologies. A far-away war rages, feelings are being pharmaceutically regulated, and all anyone cares about is stupid stardom.