Six Degrees of John Guare
2007-2008 Season: Full Productions
Six Degrees of Separation: October 10 - November 11, 2007
A Few Stout Individuals: January 16 - February 17, 2008
Landscape of the Body: March 5 - April 6, 2008
The House of Blue Leaves: May 14 - June 15, 2008
2007-2008 Season: Staged Readings
Bulfinch's Mythology: November 15 - November 18, 2007
Bosoms and Neglect: January 28 - February 3, 2008
About the playwright: John Guare
"What an honor it is for a playwright to have a theater consider his or her work produced over a range of years. Theater is such a thing of fashion. Plays and playwrights go in and out of style. You're only as good as your last play is the adage. Profile Theatre takes the revolutionary tack that you're only as good as all your plays. Profile Theatre believes in a playwright's body of work and asks the audience to join them in looking at plays as part of a continuum and not just another night out. In a world where serious theater is an oxymoron, Profile Theatre is an oasis, a rarity, daring you to be challenged, promising you nourishment. Hurrah Profile!"
America's preeminent playwright of satires, black comedies and screwball farces, John Guare began his playwriting career at the age of 11 and his first play was produced when he was 24. The author of more than two dozen plays, he also wrote the award-winning original screenplay for Atlantic City and adapted his stage play, Six Degrees of Separation, to the screen. Guare won an Obie Award in 1968 for Muzeeka, and The New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for The House of Blue Leaves in 1971. He received Antoinette Perry Award nominations for The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation in 1990, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun in 1995. He has also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, Two Gentleman of Verona in 1971, and wrote the book for the recent Broadway musical, Sweet Smell of Success (2002). He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to the Theatre Hall of Fame.
"Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical."
A Word from the Artistic Director
John Guare's plays are dazzling gifts to actors and audiences alike, full of theatricality, diverse casts of characters and even more diverse stories. This master playwright has been creating works for the theatre over the past forty years and he's still going strong, currently working on new work that will be announced in the near future for production in New York. In this its 11th season, Profile is proud to be heralding in a new decade with one of the world's most unique and ingenious playwrights, John Guare.
One of the best problems I face as the Artistic Director of Profile Theatre is deciding which plays to include in our season. This year it was especially challenging because there are so many great plays to choose from. The season has gone through a number of constructions before making these final selections. Great playwrights are like great artists in that they have plays that fall into groupings or phases of a career. In presenting Six Degrees of John Guare, you will be able to enjoy Guare's body of work from his first breakthrough play, The House of Blue Leaves (1968), to his most recent play, A Few Stout Individuals (2002), with a wildly varied sampling from everything in between including Landscape of the Body (1977), Six Degrees of Separation (1990), Bulfinch's Mythology (2000), and Bosoms and Neglect (1979). When John and I arrived at the final selections for the season, his response was "this is a playwright's dream."
I first discovered this playwright in the summer of 1971 and I've been smitten ever since. A new play by John Guare, has the same impact on me as the new Harry Potter book - I have to read it or see it immediately. It gives me untold pleasure to introduce a full season of the plays of John Guare - a rare treat awaits you.
