John Guare

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 himGuare'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 societyDramas 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. This deluxe collector's edition gathers cherished masterpieces and rare and hard-to-find gems by one of our greatest living playwrights.

The 2012 winner of the Yale Drama Series A fifteen-year-old boy decides to accompany his severely depressed high school French teacher on a road trip to the Canadian province of Quebec, where the mother tongue of Voltaire and Balzac is still spoken and cherished. Clarence Coo’s mesmerizing new play is a delicious amalgam of farce and tragedy, a carnival funhouse with very dark corners. Wildly inventive and heartbreakingly sad, the strange odyssey of Jimmy and the unpredictable Mr. Green takes many surprising turns, crossing the border from reality into unreality and back again while encountering displaced characters from history, literature, and the mundane, often dangerous world. Selected by Tony Award–winning playwright John Guare (House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and others) from over 1,000 submissions from 29 countries, Clarence Coo’s Beautiful Province is the sixth winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize. In his foreword, Guare calls Coo’s work “elusive and haunting . . . funny, desperate, insane,” praising it for “its intriguing story [and] its tone, sustained to the very end.” Lyrical and adventurous, Beautiful Province is an outstanding new theatrical work, well deserving of these accolades and more.

Announcing the 2011 winner in the Yale Drama Series When he was twelve, Joe snuck into the field on the edge of town and saw the Town Mayor with his sister Peregrine. This one moment has overwhelmed and transformed his life, becoming the only thing that holds any importance to him. Years later, in jail for murder, Joe waits for Peregrine so that he can explain his plan for her future, a plan so intricately assembled that he has given it a name—New Light Shine. Four characters in Shannon Murdoch's bold new play are trapped in an argument of memory that threatens to turn perception into truth. Their task is to dig through years of silence and half-truths to arrive at a future that may at last bring peace. In the ensuing struggles, disturbing questions arise—about female and child sexuality as well as the responsibilities of government and community in raising children. Selecting Murdoch's New Light Shine from more than 800 submissions that arrived from the far reaches of the English-speaking world, contest judge John Guare praises the distinct voice of this play and its challenging subject. "I read it, put it aside, went back to it, couldn't get it out of my head," he recollects. "This raw, haunting, richly poetic, deeply emotional play affected me as no other entry did."

John Guare's new play is astonishing, raucous and panoramic. A Free Man of Color is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold, and class, racial and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is the mulatto Jacques Cornet, who commands men, seduces women and preens like a peacock. But, it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase brings American rule and racial segregation to the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents, turning the tables on freedom and liberty.

FarceCharacters: 4 male 6 femaleInterior SetArtie 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

The extraordinary tragicomedy of race, class and manners.

"I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation... It's a profound thought... How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds." Six Degrees of Separation is a modern American classic play: an explosive comedy that exposes white middle-class hypocrisy and prejudice. The play is a sharp, witty but serious exploration of the individual in society and the values or beliefs which motivate them. A young African-American man gains access to the homes of upper-class New Yorkers by pretending to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier. Treated with suspicion and then affection, he soon wreaks havoc in their comfortable lives. The play first opened off-Broadway in 1990 and, after playing to sold-out houses and ovating audiences, it was produced internationally and made into a blockbuster film starring Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing and Will Smith in 1994. It won numerous awards, including an Olivier and New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.

John Guare is one of America's darkest post-war playwrights The House of Blue Leaves is about "the clash between American dreams and the American way of death" (Village Voice); The Landscape of the Body moves between a ferry to Nantucket and Greenwich village and is a "darkly lyric comedy about spiritual void and urban overkill" (New York Times); Bosoms and Neglect is a "terrific American mother-son play" (New York Post) and Six Degrees of Separation is an explosive comedy that exposes white middle-class hypocrisy and prejudice, it is "transcendent, magical, a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did in Bonfire of the Vanities."