John Guare: Plays (LOA #392)

Tony Kushner presents a career-spanning collection of masterworks by the author of Six Degrees of Separation

The very best plays by one of the foremost American playwrights of his generation, in a selection prepared in consultation with the author

“More than any other American playwright, John Guare’s work feels uncannily prophetic,” observes Tony Kushner. “His plays, with an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror, map out the landscape of what life feels like in the here and now.”

Here is an indispensable one-volume retrospective of an essential American playwright. A selection of one-act plays from the 1960s show Guare exploring, on a small scale, the subjects that would continue to preoccupy him: family relationships, the distortions of desire in consumer culture, the unruly coexistence of the absurd and the psychologically raw. These short plays set the stage for Guare’s breakout Off-Broadway hit, The House of Blue Leaves, a daring, darkly hilarious comedy that presciently takes aim at the excesses of celebrity worship in America. Carefully plotted to yield unexpected surprises, plays such as Rich and Famous and Landscape of the Body delve into the nature of envy and longing amid an ostentatiously affluent society; dramas set in the past, such as the Lydie Breeze trilogy and the later A Free Man of Color, take a broader historical view of America’s utopian longings and racial hypocrisies. His best-known work, Six Degrees of Separation, shows itself to be an enduring landmark of the American stage, a stunning fusion of comic and tragic elements and a subtle, emotionally powerful investigation into the depths of deception and authenticity. The volume prints for the first time Guare’s short play “Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning” as well as his acclaimed screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Atlantic City.