John Guare: Plays (LOA #392)

Tony Kushner presents a career-spanning collection of 14 masterworks by the Tony Award-winning author of Six Degrees of Separation The very best plays by one of the foremost American playwrights of his generation “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. It includes: A selection of one-act plays from the 1960s that show Guare exploring, on a small scale, the subjects that would continue to preoccupy him 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 that 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, which 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. 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. This deluxe collector's edition gathers cherished masterpieces and rare and hard-to-find gems by one of our greatest living playwrights.

About the Author :
John Guare (b. 1938) is the author of more than twenty full-length and one-act plays, which have earned him Tony, Obie, and New York Drama Critics Circle awards. Among his best-known works are the plays The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), as well as the screenplay for the film Atlantic City (1980), directed by Louis Malle. He is the recipient of the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tony Kushner, editor, is a playwright best known for his two-part epic drama, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, and Homebody/Kabul. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s television adaptation of Angels in America and the screenplays for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans. Anne Cattaneo, editor, is the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. She is the author of The Art of Dramaturgy. Michael Paller, editor, is a dramaturg and the author of A Five-Act Play: 50 Years of A.C.T. and Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama. He currently teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts.