Playwright, born in New York City, USA. His first success came with The House of Blue Leaves (1970), a sardonic comedy about how the pope's visit to New York affects a zookeeper's family. He wrote several plays for Joseph Papp's Public Theater, and had his second major hit with Six Degrees of Separation (1990, filmed 1993).
In the foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:
Life
Guare was born in New York City and raised in Queens. The House of Blue Leaves (1971), a domestic drama by turns wildly comic and despairingly desperate, moved Guare into the front ranks of American dramatists. Chaucer in Rome, a sequel to The House of Blue Leaves, received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 1999 and later enjoyed a production in New York by Lincoln Center Theater.
Later plays include Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Moon Over Miami, Six Degrees of Separation, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. Six Degrees of Separation (1990), an intricately plotted comedy of manners about an African-American confidence man who poses as the son of film star Sidney Poitier, has been the most highly praised and widely produced of Guare's full-length plays.
Mr. Guare’s cycle of plays on nineteenth-century America, Gardenia, Lydie Breeze and Women and Water, has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C., London and Australia. 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 of 1997, conducted by Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic.
Mr. Guare was a founding member in 1965 of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut and Resident Playwright at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. He is a council member of the Dramatists Guild, co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review and co-produces the New Plays Reading Room Series at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.
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