John Guare

John Guare, born February 5, 1938, is an American playwright and screenwriter best known for The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. His work belongs to the late twentieth-century American theater, with early productions in places such as Caffe Cino, the Public Theater, Lincoln Center Theater, Broadway, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Critics and theater leaders placed him among the dramatists who changed contemporary American theater in the final decades of the century.

Guare was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 1949, after his father suffered a heart attack, the family moved to Ellenville, New York, where his father’s relatives lived. Guare later found the experience idyllic. He did not regularly attend school there because the school’s daily practices did not match Catholic Church recommendations, and his father suspected communist leanings. Home study left him time to go to the movies and see the hits of the period, an influence that stayed with him. He studied at Georgetown University and the Yale School of Drama, earning an M.F.A. in Playwriting in 1962.

At Georgetown, under Donn B. Murphy’s direction, Guare’s The Toadstool Boy, about a country singer’s quest for fame, won first place in a District of Columbia one-act-play competition. His early plays were mostly comic one-acts with a taste for the absurd, including To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza and Muzeeka. Cop-Out reached Broadway in 1969. Then came The House of Blue Leaves, a domestic black comedy that premiered Off-Broadway in 1971, returned Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center in 1986, transferred to Broadway that year, and was revived on Broadway in 2011.

Guare’s later stage work ranged widely. Marco Polo Sings a Solo was produced by the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977. Bosoms and Neglect appeared on Broadway in 1979. His nineteenth-century America cycle, Gardenia, Lydie Breeze, and Women and Water, follows idealistic characters trying to create a utopian society. Six Degrees of Separation opened Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater in 1990 and became his most widely praised and widely produced full-length play. It was made into a 1993 film starring Stockard Channing and Will Smith.

He also wrote for film and musical theater. His screenplay for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City earned him an Oscar nomination. With Mel Shapiro, he wrote the libretto for Two Gentlemen of Verona, which won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. He wrote the book for Sweet Smell of Success, receiving a 2002 Tony nomination, and his play A Free Man of Color was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Beyond individual works, Guare helped build places where plays could be read, argued over, and made. He was an original member of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 1965, a Resident Playwright at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a council member of the Dramatists Guild, founder and Co-Executive Editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, co-producer of the New Plays Reading Room Series at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, and a teacher in Yale’s playwriting department. His sentences carry because they mix comedy, unease, social performance, and human need, often in the same breath.