A Love Song for the Theater:An Interview with John Guare Nathaniel G. Nesmith (bio) JOHN GUARE's career as a playwright has made him a dominant figure in theater for over six decades. Born in New York City in 1938, he has receivedTony, Obie, and Olivier awards, among many other distinctions. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for an Oscar. Guare, who earned an MFA from Yale University, began his career in the theater during the 1960s at the legendary Caffé Cino. His most recent play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, opened at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in March 2019, directed by Jerry Zaks. He is best known for his plays Six Degrees of Separation (1990), which became a feature film (1993), and The House of Blue Leaves (1971), for which he won an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Among his Broadway credits are Sophisticated Ladies (1981), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), Kiss Me Kate (1999), Sweet Smell of Success (2002), and A Free Man of Color (2010). Among his many other plays are Did You Write My Name in the Snow? (1963); To Wally Pantoni We Leave a Credenza (1965); Muzeeka (1967), for which he won an Obie Award; Cop-out (1968); Kissing Sweet (1969); Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1973); Rich and Famous (1974); Landscape of the Body (1977); Lydie Breeze (1982); Gardenia (1982); Moon over Miami (1989); Women and Water (1990); Lake Hollywood (1999); Chaucer in Rome (2001); A Few Stout Individuals (2002); Erased/Elźbieta (2011); and 3 Kinds of Exile (2013). He also wrote the book and lyrics for a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) and adapted a story by Anton Chekhov (The Talking Day, 1986). His screenplays include Taking Off (1971); Atlantic City (1980), for which he received an Academy Award nomination; and the aforementioned Six Degrees of Separation (1993). John Guare was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989; in 1993 was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame; and in 2014 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild of America. He is one of the founding members of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and has taught playwriting at many institutions. I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Mr. Guare at his apartment in New York City in September 2018, covering everything from his early days as a child dramatist to his upcoming opening at Lincoln Center. —NGN [End Page 162] ngn You've said that you've loved to go to the theater since you were seven, and you knew that writing plays would be your way of working there. Why theater and not another artistic field? john guare I had two great uncles who toured in vaudeville from 1880 to 1917 and I had their handwritten sides—actors' sides with the cue lines. Their plays were terrible melodrama—Pawn Ticket 210, The Old Toll House—but I was absolutely fascinated by the past, about traveling around America. And then when I was a kid, I went to see Annie Get Your Gun and it was overwhelming. The immediacy of the theater, and that it was so formal: You had to go at a certain time. You had to sit in a certain seat. It began, it ended. I loved being part of the audience. It was amazing how something up on stage could make a thousand people laugh or gasp at the same moment. Growing up in New York City, I would go and see a show at least once a year, always on my birthday. Going to the theater always meant something special, you got dressed up for it back then. I loved that—that world seemed to me to have an excitement and exhilaration. ngn How did it happen that your first play was produced when you were only eleven? john guare I saw in Life magazine—Life Goes to Summer Vacation—a story of these two eleven-year-old boys making an eight-millimeter film of Tom Sawyer white...