John Guare

A play about a young, black con man and the wealthy white family he fools, deals with liberal guilt, greed, loveless families, false aesthetics, and modern life in New York City.

A Play

Six Degrees of Separation

John Guare’s new play is astonishing, raucous and panoramic. A Free Man of Color is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold, and class, racial and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is the mulatto Jacques Cornet, who commands men, seduces women and preens like a peacock. But, it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase brings American rule and racial segregation to the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents, turning the tables on freedom and liberty.

A Free Man of Color

Artie Shaugnessy is a songwriter with visions of glory. Toiling by day as a zoo-keeper, he suffers in seedy lounges by night, plying his wares at piano bars in Queens, New York where he lives with his wife, Bananas. Much to the chagrin of Artie's downstairs mistress, Bunny Flingus, who'll sleep with him anytime but refuses to cook until they are married. On the day the Pope is making his first visit to the city, Artie's son Ronny goes AWOL from Fort Dix stowing a home made-bomb intended to blow up the Pope in Yankee Stadium. Also arriving are Artie's old school chum, now a successful Hollywood producer, Billy Einhorn, with starlet girlfriend in tow, who holds the key to Artie's dreams of getting out of Queens and away from the life he so despises. But like many dreams, this promise of glory evaporates amid the chaos of ordinary lives.

A Play in Two Acts

The House of Blue Leaves

One of John Guare's classic plays, Landscape of the Body tells the story of a woman's unfulfilled life and premature death--and her reflections from the grave. Betty travels to New York to convince her sister Rosalie to leave her gritty New York City life and come home to bucolic Maine. After dying in a freak bicycle accident, Rosalie revisits the world she has left behind. From the beyond Rosalie witnesses Betty effortlessly easing into her previous persona--moving into her apartment, taking over her job, but then Betty abruptly loses her teenage son to a gruesome murder. In a sardonic turn of events, Betty finds herself the primary suspect in her son's death. In what Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press called "his most surreal and haunting play," John Guare brilliantly moves back and forth in time and space to create an affecting study of the American dream gone away.

Landscape of the Body

A funny, touching portrait of two people searching for happiness, this simply staged romance played to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Off-Broadway. ...a gently charming little play, reminiscent of Thornton Wilder in its look at rusti

The General of Hot Desire and Other Plays

THE STORY: The time is 1999, the place an island off the coast of Norway. Stony McBride, a young movie director and adopted son of an aging Hollywood star, is writing a film about Marco Polo, in which, it is hoped, his father will make a comeback.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo

“Two previously produced full-length plays . . . welded into a seamless whole . . . is wonderful theater and satisfying, compelling reading.” —Booklist From award winning playwright John Guare, an extensive reworking of his two 1981 plays about a nineteenth-century commune in Nantucket. Lydie Breeze is a two-play, six-hour cycle about four seekers who come to the island to create a special model for a better world in the ashes of the Civil War and end up as a model for the corruption of twentieth-century idealism. The result is an almost surreal saga of American life, with allegorical meditations on the contradictions and interconnectedness of all things and the chaotic nature of the universe.

Lydie Breeze

The Tony Award-winning playwright spins “a tale of adultery, racism and the Louisiana Purchase...with daring and dizzying skill” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times). The author of classics American plays such as Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, Tony and Obie Award-winning playwright John Guare is celebrated for his theatrically playful, intellectually dazzling imagination. His play “A Free Man of Color evolves from a bustling farce into something deeper and darker but similarly exhilarating” (USA Today). A Free Man of Color is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold and class, racial, and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine, and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is Jacques Cornet, a mixed-race gentleman who commands men, seduces women, and preens like a peacock. But it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase brings American rule and racial segregation to the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents, turning the tables on freedom and liberty.

Brings together three ascerbic comedies by the prize-winning playwright--The House of Blue Leaves, Landscape of the Body, and Bosoms and Neglect--that view family relationships and crumbling American values

Plays

Three Exposures

THE STORY: Scooper, a successful but emotionally insecure man edging reluctantly into his forties, discovers that his aged, blind mother, Henny, has been hiding the fact that she is suffering from cancer. With some difficulty he persuades her to undergo s

Bosoms and Neglect

THE STORIES: SOMETHING I'LL TELL YOU TUESDAY. About to enter the hospital for treatment of what may be a more grave condition than the others suspect, Agnes reassures her husband, Andrew, and asks that they walk to the hospital together. But their

The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year : Two Plays

Something I'll Tell You Tuesday

THE STORIES: KISSING SWEET. First presented on New York's Channel 13 (Educational Television) as part of FOUL!, a special program on pollution and conservation, this madcap spoof of TV advertising has been specially adapted and expanded by the auth

Two Short Plays

Kissing Sweet, and A Day for Surprises

Galt MacDermot

Two Gentlemen of Verona is a rock musical, with a book by John Guare and Mel Shapiro, lyrics by Guare and music by Galt MacDermot, based on the Shakespeare comedy of the same name. The original Broadway production, in 1971, won the Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book.--Description from John Guare Wikipedia.

Two Gentlemen of Verona

The War Against the Kitchen Sink

THE STORY: One of the world's oldest living promising young playwrights, Bing Ringling is finally about to be produced--with play number 844. But, unfortunately, his lady producer, having had a series of successes, now yearns for a flop--so she can

Rich and Famous

In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, it is the year 2000, and Ron and his wife come to Rome to search for their son. And with his inimitable wit and understanding, Guare has written a scathingly funny satire on the warping hunger for fame, and the betrayal involved in creating art.

The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

THE STORY: Eros, the god of love, narrates the action of the play in haunting passages akin to the Greek choruses of ancient tragedies. We meet Penny and Philip, newlyweds who have abandoned unhappy marriages to work together on Philip's archeologi

John Guare

Books

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