John Guare – författare

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."

The extraordinary tragicomedy of race, class and manners.

The setting is Sicily, the island where the gods once spent their holidays. The principals are a newlywed couple in their forties, who hope to meld the children of their previous marriages into a brave, new, postnuclear family. But in John Guare''s vastly original and eerily beautiful new play, any family may be reconstructed as a tragic pantheon, enacting passion as ancient as the strata of an archaeological dig and as catastrophic as an earthquake.

"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's OBIE Award-winning comedy unfolds in New York City on the day the Pope is expected to visit. Hearts are palpitating in the sleepy borough of Queens, but not entirely on account of His Holiness. Bunny Flingus, a femme-fatale from Flushing (or thereabouts) is stirring things up in the quiet, unfulfilled life of aspiring songwriter Artie Shaughnessy. Artie longs to leave his unhappy marriage, elope with Bunny, and write a hit song that will top the charts. A co-production with The Smithsonian Associates and Voice of America. Runtime: 1:32

In a Fifth Avenue apartment high above Central Park, art dealer Flanders Kittredge and his wife Ouisa are trying to interest a moneyed friend in a $2 million investment. When an unexpected young guest arrives, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier, the plot takes some wonderfully unexpected turns in John Guare's classic American play. Runtime: 1:44