'The House of Blue Leaves' revival

Whatever we think we know about the absurdity of modern celebrity, forget it. Believe me, John Guare saw it first and said it better. As early as "The House of Blue Leaves," circa 1970, the playwright nailed people's desperate hunger to be famous, or at least chummy with the famous, and made it all as wretched and laughable as anything curdling our culture today.

The woozy and wonderful tragicomedy about star-struck dreams has been revived with an all-star dream of a cast, including Ben Stiller as Artie, the aging zookeeper who yearns to be a songwriter but writes drivel. Edie Falco is bone-honest and atypically soft and helpless as Bananas, the crazy wife he wants to commit so he can run off to Hollywood with Bunny -- that is, Jennifer Jason Leigh -- the floozy from downstairs.

But be warned. Anyone overly attached to the zaniness of the different, but comparably terrific 1986 revival starring Swoosie Kurtz and Stockard Channing may be surprised, even dismayed, by the dark, heavily textured clouds hovering over the dead-end apartment in Queens (designed by Scott Pask).

Even if he wanted to, director David Cromer -- more celebrated for sensitive drama than raucous comedy -- cannot ignore the screwball twists, not in a play about the day in 1965 when both Pope Paul VI and a Hollywood mogul come to Queens and three competitive nuns break into the flat to watch the pope on TV.

But Cromer underplays the cuteness of the grotesquery. Instead, he digs deeper for the kind of laughs that also hurt in a play that, for all its generosity and humor, is lush with sad wisdom about fame, love and mass uprisings of deluded values.

Stiller, who played Artie's bomb-making psycho son in 1986, has grown up to be a tightly wound Artie, a trapped, middling man of dwindling hope who knows too well he's "too old to be a young talent." Leigh finds the insistent, awkward sensuality in Bunny, Artie's last escape hatch. Alison Pill is almost unrecognizably vulnerable as the beautiful deaf starlet, betrothed to Artie's big-shot Hollywood cousin Billy -- played with shrewd sweetness by Thomas Sadoski.

In Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation," a character says, "Imagination is a gift that makes self-examination bearable." Guare is that kind of gift.

WHAT "The House of Blue Leaves"

WHERE Kerr Theatre,

219 W. 48th St., Manhattan

INFO $57-$132; 212-239-6200; houseofblueleaves.com

BOTTOM LINE Stiller, Falco and Leigh in a darker but no less wonderful revival