Playwright John Guare is not interested in talking about how his work has evolved. "I never look back and say, this is where I was and this is where I'm going. If I could say what my genre is I wouldn't have to be reshaping it each time." And he is equally impatient with the idea that a play is anything but autobiographical: "What else do we have to talk about?" Writing about unfamiliar topics is contemptible, he suggests. His intonation drives home the parody. " "I'm the child of Rumanian royalty‹and English is my third language.' " He cites a view he likes. "Jean Rhys says "I'm my own book'."
Still, he reluctantly concedes he is forced into a backward glance. Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company has, after all, devoted its 1998-99 season to three John Guare plays. The series began with "Marco Polo Sings a Solo" (1973) and will conclude with a new John Guare work this spring. Its current presentation, Guare's 1979 "Bosoms and Neglect," bows on Dec. 13.
"Bosoms and Neglect" details the unraveling‹ultimately violent‹relationship among an 83-year-old blind woman with cancer, her anxiety-ridden son, and the delusional woman he picks up at his shrink's. It's at once social commentary on how we don't connect with each other, and topical screwball comedy (à la 1979) that summons up characters out of a Woody Allen flick.
"It's about evasion," says Guare, a tall 60ish Manhattan native who sports wire-rimmed glasses. "It's about the event that all of us have to face and do everything to avoid: confronting the death of our parents and thus confronting ourselves."
Guare suggests that each of his plays punctuates the end of a period in his life: "A flag that can be marked in time, but it's all a bolt of the same cloth." A repeated theme: "How far we can expand ourselves without bursting. The characters in "Bosoms and Neglect' live in fear that their lives are ordinary and banal. They want to believe that if they unlock themselves their lives will be revealed like enormous novels and it will all make sense‹large sense."
We meet in an 11th Avenue diner that's real kitsch and make-believe kitsch, and Guare enjoys all of it, pointing out the large electronic screen hanging from the ceiling where diners can play bingo. He asks the waiter about his Rugrat watch‹Guare wants to know more about the cartoon icons‹and when the waiter introduces himself, "I'm David," Guare responds, "Hi, I'm John. I will be your patron tonight." It's clich -recognition time. Guare can be mocking and dismissive, yet, paradoxically, not unfriendly.
Best known for "Six Degrees of Separation," which earned the playwright the 1990 Critics Circle Award/Best Play Hull-Warriner Award and an Obie, Guare is also the author of "The House of Blue Leaves" (1971 New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and Obie). He wrote the lyrics and was co-author of the book for "Two Gentlemen of Verona" (1972 Tony Award), and penned the screenplay "Atlantic City," (New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics Circle awards, and an Oscar nomination).
His stylistic hallmark‹more so in the plays than in the movie‹is his use of fractured time, flights of fancy, and wild, unexpected imagery that merges nightmare and burlesque. Consider the transsexual in "Marco Polo Sings a Solo"‹a man who is now a woman and has impregnated himself. The futuristic play‹dark, but farcical‹brings to mind a sci-fi vision with nods to both absurdism and Ibsen-like realism. "A Doll's House" is alluded to, literally and figuratively.
Guare does not admire naturalism. "Theatre is poetry. It's a place for metaphor. And the playwright has an obligation to take the audience to where it has never been before. The difference between theatre and schizophrenia is very thin. Obviously, the bridge [from schizophrenia] has to be crossed so the audience knows what you're talking about.
"And that's the challenge the playwright faces. But it's a risk worth taking and preferable to writing plays where the curtain goes up to a clearly recognizable world, with clearly recognizable problems, and the audience walks away saying, "Isn't life wonderful?' or, "Doesn't life stink?' Neither is fully honest."
On good acting: "I like actors who enjoy playing to an audience. They should be verbal and musical. I love the grand gesture and actors who are not afraid to go over the top in auditions. You can always cut back."
On bad acting: "The legacy of Stanislavski and Strasberg suggesting an actor is there to explore his neurosis and that his own sadness is more important than the story. It's the refuge of the untalented."
On art: "Now, this one is pretentious." A pleased, small smile. "In life, the answers are always happening in the next room, in the place you're not. In art we put you in that room." Beat. "Let me write that down."
Family Business
Brought up in Jackson Heights, Queens, Guare recalls his father telling him early on, " "Don't ever get a job. Make sure it's legal‹and fun‹but never work for anyone else.' He worked at the stock exchange and was that unhappy!" Guare knew from the outset that he wanted a career in theatre. Performance was in his genes.
"I had two granduncles who toured the vaudeville circuit between 1880 and 1917, performing melodramas. They were part of a stock company and had a dozen plays in repertory." Guare's voice deepens, his tone fake portentous: " "The same thunder, the same lightning 25 years ago when my son left, taking money he did not know was rightfully his. Oh-h-h-h! If only I can see him before I die.' Knock. Knock." Guare is rapping his knuckles on the tabletop, indicating that the prodigal son is arriving just on cue for the death-bed scene."
Guare's uncle was Bill Grady, head of casting at MGM who made the now famous‹indeed, infamous‹judgment of Fred Astaire's first audition: "Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little." Guare describes a bizarre encounter with his uncle that has the quirky character of a John Guare play. In fact‹and not surprisingly‹that meeting inspired a scene in "House of Blue Leaves."
"My uncle had come east to find the All-American boy to star as Huck Finn in a movie MGM was planning to make with Gene Kelly and Danny Kaye. Women and their children who wanted to be seen by him were chasing him all over town. So he came to our house to escape. I was eight years old and I decided I was going to be Huck Finn. I was going to be a movie star!"
"So I greeted him singing and dancing. My parents were shocked‹I was a quiet kid‹and my uncle was put off. He thought my parents had set the whole thing up, which, of course, they hadn't, and he didn't speak to any of us again for 10 years."
That meeting marked the meteoric rise and fall of Guare's acting career. Three years later, however, at the age of 11, Guare was writing plays and his playwriting career was launched (well, so to speak). He majored in English at Georgetown University and earned his Masters degree in playwriting at Yale, an experience he describes as "magnificent."
"Playwriting is a craft. That's why "wright' in playwright is spelled w.r.i.g.h.t. ["Wright" means "one who constructs something.'] In two hours you have to grab hold of your audience, write your novel, and move a room full of strangers all at the same time. Writers can be taught the mechanisms to identify what works, what doesn't, and then how to fix it."
Occasionally, Guare teaches playwriting himself: "I do it to clear out my head. I'll give a class when I'm having trouble with a play or want to solve a particular writing problem. You can only teach writing from a stance of vulnerability."
Over the decades Guare's esthetic has been shaped by a number of influences. One of the more memorable, he notes, was seeing Bert Lahr in "The Beauty Part," by S.J. Perelman. "Lahr destroyed the boundaries of human identity as we know it. He played six parts with a kind of insanity‹" The sentence remains incomplete. "I've always dreamt of achieving a level of danger and intensity that could drive an audience mad."
Two plays that opened up theatrical possibilities for Guare were Pinter's "The Homecoming," and Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw." The latter, Guare says, "took farce to a place of redemption instead of total chaos, which is what we've come to expect from farce. "The Homecoming' opened up boundaries of cruelty that I had recognized in life, but had never seen before on stage."