The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

Author: John Guare

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 2002-06-01

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1468307827

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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


John Guare

John Guare

Author: Jane K. Curry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-07-30

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0313016674

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Best known for his plays Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, John Guare is a major figure in the contemporary American theater. Other notable works by Guare include Bosoms and Neglect, Landscape of the Body, and the Lydie Breeze series. His career began with off-off-Broadway experimentation in the sixties and continues through the present. In that time Guare has created many imaginative, eccentric plays that reflect the chaos, violence, and loneliness of life in our time. He frequently combines outrageous farce with painfully serious subject matter. This sourcebook is both a convenient reference and a resource for further investigation of Guare's works. The volume chronicles his achievements with a chronology and biographical essay. It also includes summaries of his published and unpublished plays, overviews of the critical reception of each work, production credits, a primary bibliography of dramatic and nondramatic writings, and extensive annotated bibliographies of reviews and other secondary material.


John Guare’s Theatre

John Guare’s Theatre

Author: Robert J. Andreach

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-01-14

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 144380391X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.”


Annotated Chaucer bibliography

Annotated Chaucer bibliography

Author: Mark Allen

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 934

ISBN-13: 1784996459

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010


Understanding John Guare

Understanding John Guare

Author: William Demastes

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1611177391

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Duo!: The Best Scenes for Mature Actors

Duo!: The Best Scenes for Mature Actors

Author: Stephen Fife

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2015-08-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1480397172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

(Applause Acting Series). This foray into the deeply serious and deeply funny (sometimes at the same time) world of life after 40 focuses primarily on scenes that depict the struggles of contemporary characters to come to terms with disappointment and obsolescence or to redeem their lives from the mistakes or miscalculations of their youth. It draws heavily on American classics like Long Day's Journey into Night , Death of a Salesman , The Price , Glengarry Glen Ross , Fences , and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , as well as more recent classics-in-the-making like August: Osage County , Good People , and God of Carnage . There is also ample representation from British playwrights like Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray, and Peter Nichols, whose work also explores this territory of growing older in a society obsessed by youth and novelty.


The Facts on File Companion to American Drama

The Facts on File Companion to American Drama

Author: Jackson R. Bryer

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 1438129661

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Features a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.


Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre

Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre

Author: Robert J. Andreach

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2014-07-16

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0761864016

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book refutes the claim that tragedy is no longer a vital and relevant part of contemporary American theatre. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre examines plays by multiple contemporary playwrights and compares them alongside the works of America’s major twentieth-century tragedians: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. The book argues that tragedy is not only present in contemporary American theatre, but issues from an expectation fundamental to American culture: the pressure on characters to create themselves. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre concludes that tragedy is vital and relevant, though not always in the Aristotelian model, the standard for traditional evaluation.


Encyclopedia of American Drama

Encyclopedia of American Drama

Author: Jackson R. Bryer

Publisher: Infobase Learning

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 2466

ISBN-13: 1438140762

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Provides a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder's Our Town to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.


A Reader's Guide to Modern American Drama

A Reader's Guide to Modern American Drama

Author: Sanford Sternlicht

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2002-04-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780815629399

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sanford Sternlicht presents a comprehensive survey of modern American drama beginning with its antecedents in Victorian melodrama through the present. He discusses the work and achievement of more than seventy playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Suzan-Lori Parks—from the golden era of Broadway to the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theater. Stern-licht shows how world theater influenced the American stage, and how the views of American dramatists reflected the great American social movements of their times. In addition, he describes the contributions of early experimental theater, the Federal Theater of the 1930s, African American, feminist, and gay and lesbian drama—and the joyous trends and triumphs of American musical theater.