John Guare's "The House of Blue Leaves" seemed to me an extraordinary play right from the start, when I first saw the 1986 Lincoln Center production with John Mahoney, Swoosie Kurtz and Stockard Channing, and then the 1988 City Theatre version at Hartwood, with Bingo O'Malley, Shirley Tannenbaum and Katherine Carlson.

		'The House of Blue Leaves' Where: Carnegie Mellon's Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theatre. When: 8 p.m. through Fri.; Sat. 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $11-$22; 412-268-2407 or www.cmu.edu/cfa.

But seeing it now at Carnegie Mellon, I think it's actually better than extraordinary. This is one of the definitive modern American plays, a brilliantly theatrical account of the American dream gone sour. That's a hackneyed theme, but it's imagined here with such breathtaking brio that it becomes a revelation.

Of course, a student cast, no matter how talented, isn't fully able to realize the despair and panic of middle age at the play's heart. But what the CMU students do get is the accumulating frenzy of tragic farce. Guare pushes living-room tragicomedy right to the edge of surreal absurdity, without losing the feel of real people fighting for their emotional lives.

The usual way to express this is to say that Guare dramatizes the ferocious family warfare of Strindberg with the madcap farce of Feydeau. Or call it Chekhov on speed, or Orton and Durang with added depth.

Under the knowing direction of guest Karen Carpenter on a fractured set by Patrick Lynch, this impossible mix creates its own funny/painful brew. And the effect is all the stronger because CMU has forgone the grander display of the Chosky Theater for the in-your-face intimacy of the Helen Wayne Rauh Studio. (Good luck in getting a ticket.)

Would-be songwriter Artie Shaughnessy is a semi-talented middle-aged New Yorker, trapped in Queens with the glitter of Broadway taunting him on the horizon. His wife, Bananas, is depressed almost to the point of institutionalization, although that's partly strategy, because Artie is carrying on with Bunny, a younger, ambitious version of himself with whom he hopes to engineer the great midlife escape.

Mix in Artie's childhood friend, a big Hollywood star; the star's deaf starlet girlfriend; Artie and Bananas' vengeful soldier son; and three nuns who commandeer Artie's TV to watch Pope Paul VI at Yankee Stadium on this October day in 1965. More specifically, at the start of Act 2, mix most of them together with a big jar of peanut butter, two tickets to see the pope and a homemade bomb, and you have explosive comedy and heartbreak.

Patrick Cummings works hard at Artie, and I can only hope that life will be slow to bring him the disappointments he would need to draw on for this role. Thea Brooks is more spot-on as Bananas, the glint in her eye gradually looking more like life and insanity, and Liz Fenning is comic perfection as the desperately smiling starlet.

Abigail McFarlane has Bunny's naive, feral zest but isn't always intelligible through the Noo Yawk accent they all affect. Grant Tanguma has a self-congratulating plausibility as the star and Craig DeLorenzo, an oddly thuggish desperation as the son. Melissa Tang wins our hearts as the amoral Little Nun.

That nun and perhaps the superficial star are the only ones who escape the desperation that drives everyone else. Guare really knows how to stoke the passions to feed frantic conflict, which of course serves both comedy and tragedy.

He sees the violence in American life. Premiered in 1970, "Blue Leaves" has 1960s written all over it, but 2006, as well.