After these initial successes, however, Guare--like others of his generation--suffered a critical backlash for failing to live up to his early promise. One might easily imagine Guare himself voicing Artie's continual plaint from The House of Blue Leaves (1971), "I'm too old to be a young talent," or Bing Ringling's vow from Rich and Famous (1976), "I'm not going to be the World's Oldest Living Promising Young Playwright." In fact, Guare's exploration of the desperate need for success is a major thematic preoccupation in his work. Tracing the sources of this need through a tangled web of parent-child relationships, the media, literature, commercialized Catholicism, psychiatry, global politics, and a host of other contemporary fantasies, Guare creates a cartoonlike dramatic world that at its best is both agonizing and outrageously funny. Guare, as Walter Kerr observes, succeeds in "amusing--or assaulting--us with the preposterous only to dissolve the preposterous into disturbing reality." Guare's "knack for retroactively transforming the zany into the alarming, the possibly true, is unique in our time."
Guare himself has stressed the autobiographical element in his work. He grew up in Queens, which forms not only the setting but also part of the subject matter of The House of Blue Leaves.
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