John Guare Oral History: a Writer of the Theater, and of Greenwich Village
Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life.
John Guare was born in Manhattan on February 5, and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, as well as upstate New York and East Atlantic Beach, where his father built the family a house in In his oral history with Village Preservation, Guare describes spending much of his childhood alone, as was his preference, reading, listening to soap operas, and going to the movies. Of his very first play, Guare said:
I wrote my first play when I was eleven and it was done in the garage across the street here where we are in East Atlantic Beach. Long Island’s leading newspaper came in to do the story on our show and an eleven-year-old playwright, and that was that.
Guare cultivated his knowledge of theater while he was at Georgetown University,
Understanding John Guare
"An exceptionally useful introduction to the challenging work of one of the most important playwrights of the last sixty years by the preeminent scholar of contemporary American drama. This concise book combines the production history of Guare's plays, musicals, and films, a biography of the writer, and instructive analysis of the works, while situating them in their social and historical context."—Christopher J. Wheatley, Catholic University of America
"From The House of Blue Leaves to A Free Man of Color, John Guare has been one of America's most prolific, original, and fearless playwrights. William Demastes's readable, comprehensive, informed, and informative survey of Guare's oeuvre is a treat, serving equally well as reminder of or introduction to the myriad, varied plays emerging from what one critic called 'Guare's exotic yet very American imagination."—Dorothy Chansky, Texas Tech University
"Understanding John Guare offers the student, theatergoer, and interested general reader a thorough and in-depth overview of Guare's long and varied career. William Demastes—a leading authority on American drama perfectly captures Guare's hard-to-labe
Understanding John Guare
A comprehensive study of an award-winning playwright known for unconventional blending of genres
John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown U
Who is John Guare?
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate.
In the foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:
Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.
- Born
- Feb 5,
New York City - Nationality
- Profession
- Education
- Yale University
- Georgetown University
- Yale School of Drama
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on July 23,
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