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John Guare: Plays

Edited by Tony Kushner, Anne Cattaneo, and Michael Paller

Introduction by John Lahr

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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In bookstores: September 30, 2025

“More than any other American playwright, John Guare’s work feels uncannily prophetic,” writes 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.”

This Library of America edition of Guare’s dramatic works—chosen in consultation with the author—offers an indispensable one-volume retrospective of an essential American playwright. In one-act plays from the 1960s Guare explores on a small scale the key subjects that would preoccupy him throughout his career: family relationships, the distortions of desire in consumer culture, the unruly coexistence of the absurd and the psychologically raw. These plays set the stage for the breakout Off-Broadway hit The House of Blue Leaves, a daring, darkly hilarious comedy about a papal visit to Queens that presciently takes aim at American celebrity worship.

Filled with unexpected turns and revealing surprises, plays such as Rich and Famous and Landscape of the Body are funny, touching dramas about envy, yearning, and a world that always leaves us wanting more. Works set in the past, such as the Lydie Breeze trilogy and the late masterpiece A Free Man of Color, take a broader historical view of America’s utopian aspirations and racial hypocrisies. Guare’s best-known work, Six Degrees of Separation, is an enduring landmark of the American stage, a stunning fusion of comic and tragic elements and an emotionally powerful investigation into the depths of deception and authenticity.

This volume also prints, for the first time, Guare’s short play “Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning,” written in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as his acclaimed screenplay for Louis Malle’s 1980 film Atlantic City. “Guare,” writes John Lahr in this volume’s foreword, “has stories to tell, jokes to make, logic to challenge, phrases to turn, spells to cast, all of which comprise a funhouse-mirror reflection of American life’s caprice and chaos in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guare’s theatrical career of over fifty years has ranged farther and wider than almost all his contemporaries.”

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!, Hydriotaphia, 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, was the longtime dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, as well as co-editor of The Lincoln Center Theater Review. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of The Art of Dramaturgy.

Michael Paller, editor, was the dramaturg and director of humanities at the American Conservatory Theater and is the author of Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama, Williams in an Hour, and A Five-Act Play: Fifty Years of A.C.T.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Publication support for John Guare: Plays was provided by Kathleen Begala and Yves-André Istel, Jane B. Johnson, Tony Kushner, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor Stiller, Meryl Streep, and anonymous donors.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Foreword: The Dazzler by John Lahr
Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday
The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year
A Day for Surprises
The House of Blue Leaves
Rich and Famous
Landscape of the Body
Bosoms and Neglect
Atlantic City
In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes
Lydie Breeze Trilogy
Part One: Cold Harbor
Part Two: Aipotu
Part Three: Madaket Road
Six Degrees of Separation
Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning
A Few Stout Individuals
A Free Man of Color

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-816-8 868 pages

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N° 392 Library of America Series

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