John Guare + Michael Paller: John Guare: Plays

Moderating the discussion is former dramaturg Michael Paller. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of John Guare: Plays here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Dec. 1 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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Tony Kushner presents a career-spanning collection of 14 masterworks by the Tony Award-winning author of Six Degrees of Separation

The very best plays by one of the foremost American playwrights of his generation

“More than any other American playwright, John Guare’s work feels uncannily prophetic,” observes Tony Kushner. “His plays, with an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror, map out the landscape of what life feels like in the here and now.”

Here is an indispensable one-volume retrospective of an essential American playwright. It includes:

A selection of one-act plays from the 1960s that show Guare exploring, on a small scale, the subjects that would continue to preoccupy him

Guare’s breakout Off-Broadway hit, The House of Blue Leaves, a daring, darkly hilarious comedy that presciently takes aim at the excesses of celebrity worship in America.

Carefully plotted to yield unexpected surprises, plays such as Rich and Famous and Landscape of the Body that delve into the nature of envy and longing amid an ostentatiously affluent society

Dramas set in the past, such as the Lydie Breeze trilogy and the later A Free Man of Color, take a broader historical view of America’s utopian longings and racial hypocrisies.

His best-known work, Six Degrees of Separation, which shows itself to be an enduring landmark of the American stage, a stunning fusion of comic and tragic elements and a subtle, emotionally powerful investigation into the depths of deception and authenticity.

For the first time, Guare’s short play Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning as well as his acclaimed screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Atlantic City.

Born in Queens on February 5, 1938, John Guare has been one of our most interesting and imaginative playwrights since the 1960s. He received a B.A. from Georgetown University in 1961 and then went on to Yale, where he earned an M.F.A in playwriting. He worked for a few years as a reader for a London publishing firm before hitchhiking across Europe in 1965, while working on one-act plays—a form in which he excels. He is the author of more than twenty full-length and one-act plays, which have earned him Tony, Obie, and New York Drama Critics Circle awards. Among his best-known works are the plays The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), as well as the screenplay for the film Atlantic City (1980), directed by Louis Malle. He is the recipient of the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy.

Photo credit: Becket Logan

Michael Paller was the dramaturg, as well as a teacher in the MFA acting program, at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, 2005-2018, where he dramaturged over 80 productions and workshops. He has also taught at SUNY Purchase and Columbia University and is also the author of Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama (Palgrave-Macmillan), Williams in an Hour (Smith and Kraus), and A Five-Act Play: 50 Years of A.C.T. (Chronicle Books). He is writing a biography of John Guare.