undefinedAdele Chatfield-Taylor, Brigitte Lacombe, John Guare. Photograph by Clint Spaulding / © Patrick McMullan / PatrickMcMullan.com

 

John Guare’s career in the theater began at New York’s legendary Caffé Cino in the 1960s, during the birth of off-off Broadway theater, the experimental movement that has developed into contemporary American drama. In 1965, Guare was among the original members of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut. The innovative summer playwrights’ festival that began there has come to define the way American theaters develop new plays. In 1968 Guare received the Obie for his play Muzeeka, which was originally produced at the 1967 O’Neill festival. By the early seventies, Guare’s work was playing off Broadway with House of Blue Leaves (which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play) and playing on Broadway with Two Gentlemen of Verona, for which he co-adapted the book with Mel Shapiro and Galt MacDermot and wrote the lyrics. It too won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as well the 1972 Tony Award for Best Musical. During this period Guare also collaborated with Milos Forman on the screenplay of the Czech director’s first American film, Taking Off, which received the Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival.

As playwright in residence at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Guare wrote Landscape of the BodyRich and Famous, and Marco Polo Sings a SoloBosom and Neglect premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theater and played on Broadway, at the Stratford Festival in Canada, and at the Yale Repertory Theater. The Manhattan Theater Club produced Gardenia, directed by Karel Reisz, and the BBC broadcast Women and Water. His screenplay for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City received an Oscar nomination and won the New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics Circle Awards and the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival. Lincoln Center Theater revived House of Blue Leaves triumphantly in 1986 and then produced Six Degrees of Separation, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of 1991. Six Degrees also received wide critical acclaim for its London production, which opened at the Royal Court in June 1992, with Stockard Channing repeating her starring role. The Los Angeles, Sydney, Johannesburg, and Istanbul productions opened to brilliant reviews in the space of two weeks in October of 1992. Guare has taught at Yale, New York University, and Harvard. In 1981 he received the Award of Merit from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, which in 1989 elected him a member.

Guare, who was born in New York City in 1938, has lived for many years in Greenwich Village with his wife Adele Chatfield-Taylor, an historic preservationist who is president of the American Academy in Rome. Their rambling apartment is comfortably worn and packed to the ceiling with books and photographs. A nineteenth-century church steeple stands in view outside the window. At the time of the interview Guare’s new play, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, had recently opened at Lincoln Center. He had just completed a screenplay based on the life of George Gershwin, which is to be filmed by Martin Scorcese. Mary Pat Walsh, his assistant, gave advice to house guests who came in and out. The phone rang and rang. Dogs barked. Even when the interview continued at Lincoln Center, the feeling of life beating at Guare’s door persisted—as did the sense that he enjoys, or perhaps relies on, the clamor.

 

INTERVIEWER

Why do I always feel there’s something blasphemous about your work?

JOHN GUARE

I don’t know why you feel that way. Are you all right?

INTERVIEWER

There’s something dangerous about your work. A Jacobean undercurrent.

GUARE

Hold on!

INTERVIEWER

All right, let’s start with this then: you once told me that you thought of playwriting as simply another job in the theater.

GUARE

To stay around any place you love, you have to have a job. In college at Georgetown in the fifties, I got my first theater job checking coats at the National, which was Washington’s main theater. I sold orange drinks there at intermission and felt personally responsible for the entire audience’s receptivity to what was going on onstage. I ushered at the Shubert in New Haven during graduate school when plays en route to Broadway still went out of town to try out. I worked backstage at summer stock doing jobs from garbage man, to strapping on Herbert Marshall’s wooden leg, to fixing Gloria Swanson’s broken plumbing in her dressing room with her yelling at me as I worked the plunger. I ran the light board for her show, which involved bringing up all the stage lights surreptitiously when she came onstage so the audience would subliminally think, Gee, isn’t everything brighter when she’s around? I was supposed to do it very quietly. It was an old light board and very squeaky. I’d bring the lights up one point—and it squeaked. I don’t know what the audience felt when they heard that sound—when she came on and left the stage. It was called a “star bump.” Knowing lore like that made me feel there was a secret freemasonry to the theater. Then I toured as an advance man for a summer stock package, setting up the show each week in a different theater before moving on to the next. Even with Six Degrees of Separation I felt part of my job as playwright was to go backstage two or three times every week during the run to check the backstage temperature—who’s unhappy, who’s not speaking, whose costumes are wearing out. You must keep people happy backstage because that affects what’s onstage. During a run, the playwright feels like the mayor of a small town filled with noble creatures who have to get out there and make it brand new every night. When a production works, it’s unlike any other joy in the world.

INTERVIEWER

So you chose the theater life early on.

GUARE

My parents started taking me to plays early. Plays have a celebratory nature that no other form has. Theater always meant celebration, a birthday, a reward for good grades. I felt at home in a theater. I loved being part of an audience. All the rules—the audience has to see the play on a certain date at a certain time in a certain place in a certain seat. You watched the stage in unison with strangers. The theater had intermissions where you could smoke cigarettes in the lobby and imagine you were interesting. The theater made everybody in the audience behave better, as if they were all in on the same secret. I found it amazing that what was up on that stage could make these people who didn’t know each other laugh, respond, gasp in exactly the same way at the same time.

INTERVIEWER

What was the first play you saw?

GUARE

Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman.

INTERVIEWER

I have a theory that there are two kinds of people in the theater . . . those who started out because they went to see Annie Get Your Gun or those who went into it because they read Antonin Artaud.

GUARE

I was reading Artaud during Annie Get Your Gun. A girl, Jane, in our grammar school class was actually in Annie Get Your Gun, and she’d be off Wednesdays for matinees. On holidays, Sister Donalda, the very stern superior, would come to our class and ask Jane to come forward and sing Sister’s favorite song; Jane would step to the front of the class and belt out “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun.”