Since his early days, Guare has adhered to the fundamental principle of traditional dramaturgy—the need for a recognizable plot. However unconventional his treatment of the story line, there is an implicit understanding of the basic situation as relevant to some aspect of our lives. Be it the social tragedy of individuals (Muzeeka), or the personalized sufferings of people cast far afield in an alien world (Marco Polo Sings a Solo), Guare's plays situate their themes amidst the shifting realit...

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 the man who wrote "The House of Blue Leaves," "Landscape of the Body" and the screenplay for "Atlantic City." Sad to say, it is all too easy to believe that "Gardenia" comes from the playwright who earlier this season unveiled "Lydie Breeze." Mr. Guare's new play...

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, early 20th-century American dreams, collapse under the wreckers' ball. "Lydie Breeze," the Guare-Malle theatrical collaboration that opened at the American Place last night, is set in another crumbling beach town of another era—hurricane-gutted Nantucket in 1895—but it is about the same dreams, the same gh...

[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 inventions whose very construction reflects the bizarre, absurd, and violent material they are designed to distill. They are by nature original rather than derivative—it's a kind of originality out of necessity, which in itself communicates something about our present condition. Guare plays are unlike any other plays; they disregard one&...

[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 influenced by the theater of the absurd, and playwrights such as Ionesco and N. F. Simpson, Mr. Guare is a most promising young playwright. This double bill ["Cop-Out" and "Home Fires"] is a strange John Guare 1938– © Jerry BauerBroadw...

"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, elegiac, melodramatic, funny, sorrowing and celebratory play has ached for a utopia of one sort or another: the primal utopia of parental connection, the sentimental utopia of romantic love, the civic utopia of sharing and brotherhood. "Lydie Breeze" is about these aches, which are never to be assuaged, and about these utopia...

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 son her cancerous breast which she has been treating with Kotex and St. Jude for the past two years. John Guare would do well to take that scene and burn it, interpolating what little exposition it contains into one of the speeches that follow. For this prologue hovers like the Vulture of Significance over the rest of the play, a false, pretentio...

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 fancy boils over into a tempest of hilarity. They are the best things in the play; they provoke wild laughter and merit enthusiastic applause. Still, the play remains unfulfilled; the reasons are worth careful attention. Guare is not simply a prankster. What motivates him is scorn for the fraudulence of our way of life. In The House of Blue L...

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, according to a note in the program, "for Adele Chatfield Taylor." Only one character—the idealistic writer Joshua Hickman—survives the time-span from the end of Gardenia to the start of Lydie Breeze, although we hear much of the political aspirations of another, Amos Mason, and one play is very much the sequel to th...

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 largest stable in the American theater. Let's wish him luck with his final entry. The first two nags haven't shown the stamina to finish the course, and they are being led to the starting post in confusing chronological order…. That history is happening in Gardenia, rather than being recalled, should result in a more active pl...

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, whenever his astonishing dramatic talent for creating characters and lines and scenes is let loose, he is invaluable; it is only his abstract thoughts, as spoken by the characters in a number of set pieces, that tend to become trying. The play … begins aboard a ferry from Cape Cod to Nantucket. Betty, the heroine, burdened with overfl...

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 disappointing House of Blue Leaves…. His early short plays like Muzeeka had imaginative release and exuberant humor, but nothing of his that I have seen, including his screenplay for the Milos Forman film Taking Off, came close to satisfying. So it continues with his [Rich and Famous]…. It consists of the fantasies of a young playwright on t...

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, he has been prematurely thrown into the spotlight, and like the raw vaudevillian in that old art routine, he tap dances frightenedly because he is expected to. Mr. Guare had not had the benefit of experience, discipline or knowing guidance, and his "Cop-Out" is an unrealized idea…. In "Cop-Out," which is two ...

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 is his latest work, "Bosoms and Neglect," about?… [Both] the ravaged bosom and the two species of neglect remain more like stated topics than developed themes…. Although the author is very good indeed at writing funny one-liners, and from time to time gives us one-liners that are, by calculation, not at all funny,...

[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 book levels that prove grotesque and outlandish but only very sparsely funny, and also unrelated and immiscible. Someone else might have put them believably together; in Guare's unsure grasp they fall apart like a card castle being built by a sufferer from Parkinson's disease. The play, moreover, fluctuates between the absurdis...

[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 disorganized), Bosoms and Neglect should not have been treated as a play without a right to exist. It was a serious attempt by a serious writer. Guare's previous plays—Landscape of the Body and Rich and Famous—were not satisfactory, but he had demonstrated a literary flair and comic originality in such early works as Muzeeka and The...

[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, the empty conventions, and the all-round hooey of "America Hurrah." (p. 91) There are funny ideas and funny scenes scattered through ["Muzeeka"]…. But Mr. Guare keeps insisting on the significance of things that he does nothing to make significant … and his generalizations about America have a weak...