Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves

In 1999, a pregnant woman in a wedding dress, the Bride, lies wounded in a chapel in El Paso, Texas. She tells her attacker, Bill, that the baby is his just as he shoots her in the head.

Four years later, the Bride, having survived the attack, goes to the home of Vernita Green, planning to kill her. Both women were members of the Deadly Vipers, a now-disbanded group of assassins led by Bill. Vernita now leads a normal suburban family life. The women engage in a knife fight, which is interrupted for the benefit of Vernita's young daughter Nikki, just before she arrives home from school. The Bride agrees to meet Vernita at night to settle the matter, but when Vernita tries to shoot the Bride with a pistol hidden in a box of cereal, the Bride throws a knife into Vernita's chest, killing her. After the Bride pulls the knife out of Vernita's chest, Nikki sees her mother's lifeless body. The Bride expresses regret at what Nikki has seen but insists that Vernita deserved it. She offers Nikki a chance to avenge her mother's death when she grows up, should she choose to do so.

Four years earlier, the cops investigate the massacre at the wedding chapel. The sheriff discovers that the Bride is alive but comatose. In the hospital, Deadly Viper Elle Driver prepares to assassinate the Bride via lethal injection, but Bill aborts the mission at the last moment. Although Elle vehemently disagrees, Bill considers it dishonorable to kill the defenseless Bride. Awakening from her four-year coma, the Bride is horrified to find that she is no longer pregnant. She kills a man who intends to rape her while she is unconscious, then a hospital worker who has raped her and has been selling her body while she was comatose. She takes the hospital worker's truck and teaches herself to walk again. Resolving to kill Bill and the other Deadly Vipers, the Bride picks her first target: O-Ren Ishii, now the leader of the Tokyo yakuza.

After witnessing the yakuza murder her parents when she was a child, O-Ren took vengeance on the yakuza boss and replaced him after training as an elite assassin. The Bride travels to Okinawa, Japan, to obtain a sword from legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzō, who has sworn never to forge a sword again. After learning that her target is Bill, his former student, he relents and spends a month crafting his finest sword for her. The Bride tracks O-Ren to the House of Blue Leaves, a Tokyo restaurant, and publicly amputates the arm of her assistant, Sofie Fatale. She defeats the Crazy 88, O-Ren's squad of elite fighters, and kills her bodyguard, schoolgirl Gogo Yubari. O-Ren and the Bride duel in the restaurant's Japanese garden; the Bride kills O-Ren by slicing off the top of her head. After torturing Sofie for information about Bill and the other Deadly Vipers, the Bride leaves her alive as a threat before going to kill Vernita. Bill finds Sofie and asks her if the Bride knows that her daughter is alive.

The House of Blue Leaves is a play by American playwright John Guare which premiered Off-Broadway in 1971, and was revived in 1986, both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and was again revived on Broadway in 2011. The play won the Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play and the Obie Award for Best American Play in 1971. The play is set in 1965, when Pope Paul VI visited New York City.

The play is set in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, New York, in 1965, on the day Pope Paul VI visited. The black comedy focuses on Artie Shaughnessy, a zookeeper who dreams of making it big in Hollywood as a songwriter. Artie wants to take his girlfriend Bunny with him to Hollywood. His wife Bananas is a schizophrenic and destined for the institution that provides the play's title. Their son Ronnie, a GI scheduled for deployment to Vietnam, has gone AWOL. Three nuns are eager to see the pope and end up in Artie's apartment. A political bombing mistakenly occurs in the apartment.

The first act of The House of Blue Leaves was first staged in 1966 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.