From John Guare: Plays
In a preface to a 1996 collection, The War Against the Kitchen Sink, Guare described his distaste for the naturalism that dominated the theater in the middle of the last century. “I despised plays with people sitting at kitchen tables pouring their hearts out and the people in the audience oohing when the people in the play turned on the faucet and real water came out. That kitchen sink. That was what I hated most.”
He added that “what the playwright does with the icon of naturalism, the kitchen sink, is the story of twentieth-century playwrighting. Does the playwright elect to keep that kitchen sink to soothe the audience? Does the playwright dismantle the kitchen sink and take the audience into dangerous terrain? How the playwright resolves this tension between surface reality and inner reality, how the playwright restores the theater to its true nature as a place of poetry, song, joy, a place of darkness where the bright truth is told, that war against the kitchen sink is ultimately the history of our theater.”
Michael Paller, who edited the Library of America edition of Guare’s plays, explained in a recent interview how Thornton Wilder influenced Guare. The kitchen-sink play expects the audience “to pretend they’re not in a theater watching actors but peering through a window in an invisible fourth wall into some ‘real’ person’s ‘real’ life. . . . Wilder advocated for a return to the theater of the ancient Greeks and Elizabethans, in which the stage was bare, where a play could travel swiftly anywhere in space and time, and the audience and actors admitted that they were together in a theater. On this stage, the actors could talk directly and intimately to the audience, confide in them or implicate them in the action, without awkwardly stepping away from the kitchen-sink world. . . . [The] empty stage lifts characters out of a specific time and place, so that, as Wilder wrote, a Juliet isn’t just one Juliet but every Juliet who ever lived (including the ones watching from the audience).”
Guare’s approach to playwrighting can be seen in his earliest plays—one-act productions that were performed in cafes and off-off-Broadway venues where there was little in the way of a boundary between stage and audience. We present one of those plays, “Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday,” on our Story of the Week site, with an introduction detailing Guare’s early career.
