Person1938
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Read and enrich the people, organizations and context referenced in case files.
Explore the cases that include this wiki entry.
No case files include this entry yet.
Investigate this subjectBe the first to comment.
John Guare ( GERR; born February 5, 1938) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
John Guare ( GERR; born February 5, 1938) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
John Guare was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 1949, his father suffered a heart attack and subsequently moved the family to Ellenville, New York, while he recovered. His father's relatives lived there, making it an idyllic experience for him. Guare did not regularly attend school in Ellenville because the school's daily practices were not in keeping with the recommendations of the Catholic Church, causing his father to suspect the school had communist leanings. Instead of attending school, Guare was assigned home study and took exams intermittently, which allowed him time to go to the movies and see all the hits of the time. This had a lasting influence on Guare and his career.
He attended Georgetown University and the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 1962 with a M.F.A in Playwriting. Under the direction of Georgetown's Donn B. Murphy, his play The Toadstool Boy, about a country singer's quest for fame, won first place in the District of Columbia Recreation Department's One-Act-Play competition. In 1960, the Mask and Bauble presented The Thirties Girl, a musical for which Guare did the book, much of the music and the lyrics, again under Murphy's tutelage. Set in 1920s Hollywood, it deals with the dethronement of a reigning diva by a fresh-faced starlet.
Guare's early plays, mostly comic one-acts exhibiting a flair for the absurd, include To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza, produced at Caffe Cino in 1965 and Muzeeka (1968).
Cop-Out premiered on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on April 7, 1969, and closed on April 12, 1969, as part of two one-act plays, including Home Fires. Cop-Out starred Linda Lavin and Ron Leibman.
The House of Blue Leaves, a domestic black comedy, premiered Off-Broadway in 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. It was revived off-Broadway at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1986 before transferring to Broadway later in 1986. The play was revived on Broadway in 2011, starring Ben Stiller, whose mother, Anne Meara, had appeared in the 1971 production. According to Marilyn Stasio writing in Variety the play "sets the bar for smart comic lunacy."
Chaucer in Rome, "said to be a sequel of sorts to ... The House of Blue Leaves and includ[ing] the son of one of the earlier play's characters" received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 1999 and was produced Off-Broadway in 2001 at Lincoln Center Theater's Newhouse Theater.
Later plays include Marco Polo Sings a Solo, produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in January to March 1977, with a cast that featured Joel Grey, Anne Jackson, Madeline Kahn, and Sigourney Weaver. Bosoms and Neglect was produced on Broadway in 1979, and revived off-Broadway in 1998 by the Signature Theatre Company. Moon Over Miami was produced at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1987 and then at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven in February 1989.
Guare's cycle of plays on nineteenth-century America are: Gardenia (1982) Lydie Breeze (1982) and Women and Water (1985). The so-called Lydie Breeze series, also called the "Nantucket" series, "follows a group of idealistic 19th century characters and their attempts to create a utopian society. "
Six Degrees of Separation was originally produced off-Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in June 1990. Six Degrees of Separation is an intricately plotted comedy of manners about an African-American confidence man who poses as the son of film star Sidney Poitier. It has been the most highly praised and widely produced of Guare's full-length plays. It was made into a film in 1993, starring Stockard Channing and Will Smith.
Guare was an original member in 1965 of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut and Resident Playwright at the New York Shakespeare Festival, during which time he wrote Landscape of the Body, Rich and Famous, and Marco Polo Sings a Solo.
He is a council member of the Dramatists Guild.
He is Co-Executive Editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, which he founded in 1987. He co-produces the New
Source: John Guare (CC BY-SA)
We label verified structured information, user opinions, and AI-discovered relationships separately.
Four Baboons Adoring the Sun was presented on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater from February 22, 1992, to April 19, 1992, and was nominated for the 1992 Tony Award, Best Play.
Lake Hollywood (1999) and A Few Stout Individuals (2002) both received their world premieres at the Signature Theatre. A Few Stout Individuals is set in nineteenth century America, with a cast of characters that includes Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, soprano Adelina Patti and the Emperor and Empress of Japan.
Guare has also been involved with musical theatre. His libretto with Mel Shapiro for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona was a success when it premiered in 1971 and was revived in 2005 at the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. It won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical as well as the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. He wrote the songs for Landscape of the Body. Guare wrote narration for Psyche, a tone poem by César Franck, which premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in October 1997, conducted by Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic.
Guare made uncredited revisions to the book for the 1999 Broadway revival of the Cole Porter musical comedy Kiss Me, Kate. He wrote the book for the musical Sweet Smell of Success, which premiered on Broadway in 2002, for which he received a 2002 Tony Award nomination, Book of a Musical.
His play A Free Man of Color was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer citation called it "an audacious play spread across a large historical canvas, dealing with serious subjects while retaining a playful intellectual buoyancy."
Guare wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film Atlantic City (1980), for which he was nominated for an Oscar.
