Understanding John Guare PDF Download

Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Understanding John Guare PDF full book. Access full book title Understanding John Guare by William Demastes. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.

Understanding John Guare

Understanding John Guare PDF Author: William Demastes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611177391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
A comprehensive study of an award-winning playwright known for unconventional blending of genres John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. The result has been a theater of surprise that is rich in stage action and experimentally invigorating. Demastes examines Guare's tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting stand-up comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals.

The House of Blue Leaves

The House of Blue Leaves PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573610288
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
Artie Shaugnessy is a songwriter with visions of glory. Toiling by day as a zoo-keeper, he suffers in seedy lounges by night, plying his wares at piano bars in Queens, New York where he lives with his wife, Bananas. Who is. Much to the chagrin of Artie's downstairs mistress, Bunny Flingus who'll sleep with him anytime but refuses to cook until they are married. On the day the Pope is making his first visit to the city, Artie's son Ronny goes AWOL from Fort Dix stowing a home made-bomb intended to blow up the Pope in Yankee Stadium. Also arriving are Artie's old school chum, now a successful Hollywood producer, Billy Einhorn with starlet girlfriend in tow, who holds the key to Artie's dreams of getting out of Queens and away from the life he so despises. But like many dreams, this promise of glory evaporates amid the chaos of ordinary lives.

Understanding John Guare

Understanding John Guare PDF Author: William Demastes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611177391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
A comprehensive study of an award-winning playwright known for unconventional blending of genres John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. The result has been a theater of surprise that is rich in stage action and experimentally invigorating. Demastes examines Guare's tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting stand-up comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals.

A Free Man of Color

A Free Man of Color PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 0822227606
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 74

Book Description
Before law and order took hold, New Orleans was boisterous; before class, racial and political lines were drawn, it was a parade of beautiful women and good-looking men, flowing wine, and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is Jacques Cornet, who commands the men, seduces the women, preens like a peacock, and cuts a wide swath through the city and the province. But, it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase will bring American rule to New Orleans, challenging the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents.

John Guare’s Theatre

John Guare’s Theatre PDF Author: Robert J. Andreach
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144380391X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
From the 1960s to the present day, John Guare’s plays have ranged from one-act to cyclic, realistic to surrealistic, naturalistic to experimental, and tragic to comic dramas. This study’s approach to the cornucopia the playwright himself provided when in an interview he gave a fundamental aesthetic principle of his craft. Like a person—and Guare’s plays develop the personal as well as the artistic self—a play must be grounded in reality; only then can it soar. The ground is traditional theatre with characters, no matter how larger than life they can be, and plot, no matter how illogical it can be. The soaring is in interrupting the action with monological narratives and musical interludes, bringing characters back from the dead, and having the action take hairpin turns into a mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones. In verbal and visual images, the flight invokes works by authors as varied as Aeschylus and Whitman, Dante and Feydeau, Verdi and Romberg. Soaring from ground to new ground, the theatre creates the transmission of the American heritage in Lake Hollywood, an idealism corrupted by a fraudulent American Dream in Lydie Breeze, and the recovery of the past in A Few Stout Individuals. As Guare said about his plays: they “interconnect.”

Muzeeka

Muzeeka PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822207962
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
THE STORY: As the New York Times outlines, It is done almost as a comedy, yet it isn't quite. Jack Argue is the 'hero,' the middle-class man from Connecticut who works for Muzeeka, a piped-music company that inflicts its bland tunes on all America. He is the man who has made it, who tries to assuage his conscience through hypocritical verbiage. There is a series of episodes-Argue chanting a hymn to a penny, Argue loving his wife, Argue loving a prostitute, Argue fighting in Vietnam. If he could have been wherever he chose to be, he says, he would have chosen to be an Etruscan, one of those ancient people who came and went 'a million years ago,' 'a whole civilization danced out of the earth.' Mr. Guare has written with thought, craftsmanship and beauty. His allusions are poetic-the traffic lights, for instance, that make the streets go from grass to blood.

A Few Stout Individuals

A Few Stout Individuals PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802140029
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his trademark Guare imagination. In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New York, Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and attempting to finish his memoirs while he's cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to his publisher Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and, via his drugged hallucinations, the emperor of Japan. Although the memoirs are eventually completed, the audience is left questioning their accuracy and, ultimately, the authenticity of history itself.

John Guare

John Guare PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781575251479
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description


The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 1468307827
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
From an American playwright who “is in a class by himself,” two acclaimed plays linked by a character who comes of age in the sixties. (The New York Times) In John Guare’s classic play The House of Blue Leaves, winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, the Pope is visiting New York, and eighteen-year-old Ronnie goes AWOL from the army to come home to New York and blow up the Pope as he passes his house. In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, it is the year 2000, and Ron and his wife come to Rome to search for their son. With his inimitable wit and understanding, Guare has written two scathingly funny satires on the warping hunger for fame, and the betrayal involved in creating art. Praise for The House of Blue Leaves: “Splendid . . . a joyful affirmation of life and of John Guare’s artistry.” —The New York Times “A woozy, fragile, hilarious heartbreaker . . . the writing is lush with sad, ironic wisdom about fame, love, and deluded values.” —USA Today Praise for Chaucer in Rome: “Guare makes us become voyeurs even as we scorn voyeurism—thus offering a titillating, troubling commentary on life.” —USA Today “Guare’s most disciplined, merciless yet lovable work since Six Degrees of Separation and maybe his best yet.” —New York Newsday

Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679734813
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description
In this soaring and deeply provacative tragicomedy of race, class, and manners, John Guare has created the msot important American play in years. Six Degrees of Separation is one of those rare works that capture both the supercharged pulse of our present era and the deepest and most mysterious movements of the human heart. Six Degrees of Separation won the 1990 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, as well as the Hull Warriner Award and the Obie.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo

Marco Polo Sings a Solo PDF Author: John Guare
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822207337
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Book Description
THE STORY: The time is 1999, the place an island off the coast of Norway. Stony McBride, a young movie director and adopted son of an aging Hollywood star, is writing a film about Marco Polo, in which, it is hoped, his father will make a comeback.