John Guare

Playwright

• Born: February 5, 1938
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT

Biography

John Guare (gwar) excels at writing plays that combine Strindbergian domestic dramas, savage farce, autobiography, and a sense of the ridiculous. He was born in Queens, a borough of New York City, to parents he would later describe as “very bright, very unhappy people,” who frequently left him alone. He turned to writing plays at age eleven to lessen his isolation. He maintained this interest by going to the theater weekly and listening to recordings of musicals, his favorite form. He was educated in Catholic schools, receiving a B.A. from Georgetown University in 1961. He then went to Yale University, graduating in 1963 with an M.F.A. Yet he was dissatisfied with the emphasis on writing traditional plays with a logical structure. While Guare was in the Air Force reserve, he rejected Catholicism. He spent the next years as a reader for a London publishing house. In the spring of 1965, he hitchhiked through Europe. During this time, Guare worked on one-act plays, the mode he felt most comfortable in.

Guare’s one-act plays foreshadow both the thematic concerns and the stylistic approach of his later work. The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year (1968) is an absurd but touching play about two lonely people who choose to be murdered by the man’s wife rather than be separated. Guare wrote Muzeeka (1968) while involved in the Vietnam War protest movement. The protagonist, Jack Argue, stabs himself to avoid coming home to a job in a cesspool company after serving in the war. The play is an attack not so much on the war as on the superficiality of the American media, which celebrate brutality and violence. The play received an Obie Award, given to Off-Broadway productions.

In Guare’s next play, Cop-Out (1968), which earned him an Obie for Most Promising Playwright, he alternates between presenting a love story between two protesters and illustrating episodes from the life of a policeman. With this juxtaposition of two styles and stories, Guare suggests that police brutality results from the media-created image. Guare’s one-act plays have a “macabre cartoonlike quality,” marking his full-length works.

The House of Blue Leaves (1971), which won for Guare the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the best American play, is one of Guare’s best-known plays. It had a successful New York revival in 1986. The principal characters have great depth and humanity, and the plot is more coherent than in many of his other works. Guare attacks Catholicism and “show biz” for promoting “dreams and phony promises.” The action takes place on the day the pope visits New York. Artie Shaughnessy, a middle-aged zookeeper, wants to commit his insane wife, Bananas, so he can go to Hollywood with his mistress and become a songwriter. Each of the characters is so entrapped in their desires for success that the needs of others go unrecognized. As in the one-act plays, the characters' frustration erupts into violence. Artie’s son Ronnie tries to assassinate the pope, and Artie strangles Bananas and retreats completely into his own fantasy world. The play is based, in part, on Guare’s relationship with his parents and the humiliating incidents from his childhood. He said, “Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.”

Two Gentlemen of Verona (1598), a rock musical written with Mel Shapiro, was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical and Tony Awards for best musical and best libretto. William Shakespeare’s play is transposed to New York and San Juan, and the theme of love’s ability to change people is treated in an optimistic way. Guare goes on to treat this same theme more pessimistically in Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1973), a science-fiction comedy, and Rich and Famous (1981), where he focuses on the drive to succeed at any cost. Landscape of the Body (1977) explores Guare’s recurring themes of alienation, change, and violence. He uses the framework of a murder mystery, through which a mother examines her reasons for killing her only son. Bosoms and Neglect (1980) dramatizes the consequences of parental neglect on a son, who can, like so many of Guare’s characters, only communicate through violence. While Bosoms and Neglect is the most naturalistic of Guare’s full-length plays, it is marked by the same black and savage humor that pervades all his work.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993), winner of an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, depicts the deceptive lure of the American success ethic in showing a young Black con man living out a fantasy to be part of upper-class society by posing as actor Sidney Poitier’s son. Guare’s most successful play since The House of Blue Leaves, this protean mainstream drama with dimensional characters and conventional structure was preceded by other uncharacteristically realistic works. Lydie Breeze (1982), Gardenia (1982), and Women and Water (1990), a bleak trilogy demonstrating cultural and moral decay, traces four Nantucket commune members’ lives backward from 1895 to the Civil War. Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, produced in 1992, concerns the failing passion of newly-wed archaeologists on a dig.

In writing a preface for The War Against the Kitchen Sink, a 1996 collection of his early plays, Guare had to reflect on his earliest work. One result, Guare said in a 1999 interview, was a reworking of a 1966 play that would become Lake Hollywood in 1999. Throughout the 1990s, he reworked his Lydie Breeze plays, culminating in a 1998 staging of the whole cycle. The General of Hot Desire (1998) is a deconstruction of the book of Genesis by a group of English literature students. The decade ended with the publication of another collection of Guare’s shorter plays.

One of its characters in the 2001 comedy Chaucer in Rome, Ron Shaughnessy, is the son of the protagonist of The House of Blue Leaves. The boy who wanted to blow up the pope in the earlier play is now a middle-aged pilgrim visiting Rome. The twin themes of Guare’s Rich and Famous are revisited in the 2002 play A Few Stout Individuals, in which a once-wealthy man whose son dissipated his fortune can regain it with a multimillion-dollar book deal for his memoirs.

In the 2010s, Guare released one Broadway play, A Free Man of Color (2010), and three off-Broadway productions, Are You There, McPhee? (2012), 3 Kinds of Exile (2013), and Nantucket Sleigh Ride (2019).

John Guare’s plays are characterized by specific and recurrent themes. He dramatizes the failure of parent-child relationships, the lack of communication within the family, the drive for success, and the escape into fantasy when reality becomes too much to bear. The plays challenge the banality of American culture and the media. Guare’s use of farce, seriocomic techniques, and irony achieved through juxtaposing the ridiculous with the painful is apparent in many plays. Although much of Guare’s canon is not sufficiently mainstream to be easily capable of winning popular or critical acceptance, most critics applaud his wit and his theatrical inventiveness. Beneath Guare’s ironic comment on American mores lies a strong belief in humanity. His dark vision and the means he uses to project that vision set him apart from his contemporaries. He remains one of America’s most interesting and imaginative playwrights.

Bibliography

"A Love Song for the Theater: An Interview with John Guare." NER Review, 2019, www.nereview.com/vol-40-no-4-2019/a-love-song-for-the-theater-an-interview-with-john-guare. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Andreach, Robert J. John Guare’s Theatre: The Art of Connecting. Cambridge Scholars Pub, 2009.

Brodersen, Elizabeth, et al. Words on Plays: Insights into the Play, the Playwright and the Production [of] Rich and Famous by John Guare ; Directed by John Nrando. American Conservatory Theater, 2009.

Demastes, William W. Understanding John Guare. University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 

Guare, John. “The Art of Theater IX.” Interview by Anne Cattaneo. The Paris Review, 1992, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1993/the-art-of-theater-no-9-john-guare. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Guare, John. Preface to The House of Blue Leaves, and Two Other Plays. New York: NAL Penguin, 1987.

Guare, John. Preface to The War Against the Kitchen Sink. New York: Smith & Kraus, 1996.

Martin, Nicholas. “Chaos and Other Muses.” American Theatre, vol. 16, no. 4, 1999, pp. 26-29.

Plunka, Gene A. The Black Comedy of John Guare. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.

Savran, David. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.