You can begin exploring American dramatist John Guare (born 1938) through plays including The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. He was born in New York City and grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. Yale's archival finding aid records degrees from Georgetown in 1960 and Yale School of Drama in 1963.
You can also explore Guare’s work in musical theatre. He and Mel Shapiro received the 1972 Tony Award for the book of Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is a shared writing award. Awards to productions and awards to an individual writer are separate distinctions.
People inventing accounts of themselves
In Six Degrees of Separation, you follow Paul as he gains entry to the lives of Ouisa and Flan Kittredge through a story about who he is and whom he knows. Their expectations help make that story persuasive. The publisher places the action in New York City.
For your production research, distinguish the original off-Broadway staging from its transfer. The original production transferred from the off-Broadway Mitzi Newhouse Theatre to the Broadway Vivian Beaumont, where it opened on November 8, 1990. The transfer distinction matters when recording a premiere.
In your rehearsal, the account a character offers of an event can itself be an action. A speaker may need a listener to admire, forgive, envy or believe. The next question is what that speaker leaves out and whether the listener's response changes the telling. This approach is a proposal to test against the play, not a claim that every Guare scene functions identically.
A question from Guare's own practice
You can hear a question from Guare’s writing practice in his 2020 interview with Molly Beach Murphy, where he recalls reading plays while asking where their characters went offstage and where they had been before entering. He also describes learning from other theatre makers' work through active observation. These are his recorded reflections on writing, rather than a formal acting method.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
The story changes the person listening
What are you doing when you tell somebody who you are? In Six Degrees of Separation, the account of identity changes what other people allow. Your listener's desires and assumptions become part of the story's power. You can investigate the telling as an exchange: which detail invites trust, which name confers access, which interruption threatens the picture you need the listener to accept? A persuasive performance requires attention to the person receiving it.
The same question becomes more complicated when a character recounts an encounter afterwards. You may need to make sense of what happened, defend your judgment, impress someone or recover something you briefly felt. You can separate the original event from the purpose of telling it now. The facts of the story can remain constant while the action of the speech changes with its audience. That gives you a concrete way to approach narration as drama.
Guare's interest in where characters have been before entering supports a further investigation. You meet a person with an offstage existence, then watch that existence collide with the room. Preparation can help you arrive already occupied. It also needs discipline: a complicated invented history is useful only when it sharpens what happens in the written scene. Try asking what the entrance makes possible for everyone already there. You may find that the stranger transforms an existing relationship as much as the stranger's own circumstances. That is a larger acting task than making an entrance memorable by itself.
Working with the text
Try this independent rehearsal investigation with your script, inspired by Guare’s interview.
Choose one entrance in your complete script. Separate three things: facts the text establishes, reasonable inferences, and possibilities you invent for rehearsal. Give the character a specific activity immediately before entering. Then enter to accomplish a clear objective with someone already present.
In your second pass, try a different plausible preceding activity without changing established facts. Ask the partner what changed in the encounter. Keep an invention only if it helps the play's circumstances and relationship become more specific; an elaborate offstage story can also distract from the immediate scene.
For a narrated passage, identify its intended listener. Rehearse the same words with two different things the speaker wants that listener to do. Observe which details become important. Return to the full play to decide whether either version is supported. This connects preparation with an experimental acting process and the choice of tactics; it does not authorize changing Guare's text or staging conventions.
Related reading
Objective, Acting process, Tactic.
Source for further study: The guide to the John Guare Papers at Yale.