AMERICAN
dramatist John Guare was born in New York City on February 5,
1938. He wrote his first play, Universe, at the tender
age of eleven. Educated at Georgetown University and Yale University,
Guare first debuted off-off-Broadway in 1964 with To Wally
Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza. His first real success, however,
did not come until 1968 when a one-act entitled Muzeeka
won him an Obie Award. In 1971, the young playwright shot to
the forefront of American theatre with House of Blue Leaves,
a semi-autobiographical play which firmly established Guare's
unique vision. In the foreward to an anthology containing House
of Blue Leaves, 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."
Guare's plays are highly theatrical. He
finds the bizarre and comic in the human condition, magnifies
it to massive propotions, and from this extracts the germ of
his writing. He once stated that he has tried to expand the theatre's
boundaries "because I think the chaotic state of the world
demands it."
Other works by Guare include Two Gentlemen
of Verona (1971), Rich and Famous (1974), The Landscape
of the Body (1977), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), and
Six Degrees of Separation (1990) which won the New York
Drama Critics Circle Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner
Award, and an Olivier Best Play Award.
This article was written
by Fletcher Anderson and originally published on this website
on April 25, 2002.
RELATED WEBSITES
|