John Guare, born in 1938, is of the generation of American playwrights that critics persist in calling "promising" and comparing with Edward Albee. After winning an Obie in the 1967-1968 season for Mu...
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John Guare has been lauded as one of the most successful American playwrights of the last third of the twentieth century. He has won three Obie (Off-Broadway) Awards, New York Drama Critics Circle Awa...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
[John Guare] is a naturally comic writer whose indications of high spirits and an original turn of mind are all but muffled by Brechtian tricks and by the plastic pranks...
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Critical Essay by Harold Clurman
John Guare's most striking talent is for savage farce. There are scenes in Act II of his first full-length play, The House of Blue Leaves …, in which his...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
In the current crop of overpraised young American playwrights John Guare is one of the few with readily discernible talent. It was discernible even in his disappoin...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
What an odd mixture of inspired comedy, sudden horror, and plain guff is John Guare's "Landscape of the Body"! Whenever his imagination takes over, ...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
Much as we may enjoy [Guare's] plays from one line to the next, we almost always end by wondering what on earth they are intended to be about. Specifically, what ...
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Critical Essay by Terry Curtis Fox
In the first scene of Bosoms and Neglect, Henny, the blind, 82-year-old mother of a 40-year-old man who calls himself Scooper, hides behind a curtain and shows her s...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
[Bosoms and Neglect] consists of three levels that stubbornly refuse to blend, and are not worth much individually either….
[We] have the mother, psychiatry, and bo...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
[Bosoms and Neglect] was an important work for an author who is at a difficult time in his career. Though predictably a commercial failure (too abstract and disorgan...
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Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
[John Guare] is a master of calculated irrelevancy. His is a world of misunderstandings and half-truths, a world of the most astonishingly logical illogicality. Deeply i...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
John Guare is a bright young playwright with a rare sense of the theatre, of words, and of the modern pop sensibility. Like too many talented new playwrights, though...
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Critical Essay by Gautam Dasgupta
Since his early days, Guare has adhered to the fundamental principle of traditional dramaturgy—the need for a recognizable plot. However unconventional his tre...
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Critical Essay by Frank Rich
In the opening shots of John Guare and Louis Malle's remarkable film "Atlantic City," we watch ghostly old beach hotels, the repositories of gilded, e...
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Critical Essay by Jack Kroll
"I was a man who ached for a utopia," says Joshua Hickman in John Guare's new play, "Lydie Breeze." Everyone in Guare's lyrical, ...
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Critical Essay by The New Yorker
[John Guare's plays] simply could not have been written in any other era—except, possibly, one in the future. Indeed, they could be described as inventio...
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Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
I was somewhat confused by John Guare's play Gardenia….
Both Gardenia and Lydie Breeze, seen earlier this season, are part of a series of plays written, ac...
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Critical Essay by Frank Rich
John Guare is still at sea in "Gardenia."… It's hard to accept that the author of this emotionally blocked, almost willfully undramatic work is...
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Critical Essay by Robert Brustein
John Guare has just run his second horse in the Lydie Breeze Sweepstakes, while a third is being saddled up for the next race. At this rate, he will soon have the lar...
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John Guare
