Understanding John Guare by William W. Demastes (review)

William Demastes's Understanding John Guare is an illuminating study of Guare's theatre, which he states is essentially an "experiment with audience expectations and theater's potential" (104). Arguing that Guare's plays demand too much of an audience and "too much of an entrenched critical community that expects a comforting familiarity that he is just not prepared to offer," Demastes surveys Guare's entire oeuvre and brings renewed attention to the playwright, who was last given a book-length study in my 2002 book, The Black Comedy of John Guare. Of particular note are Demastes's analyses of several one-act and full-length plays that Guare has written during the subsequent fifteen years, many of which receive here their first scholarly treatment.

This volume is part of the University of South Carolina Press's Understanding Contemporary American Literature series, which its editor acknowledges in the preface is aimed for audiences consisting primarily of students and "good nonacademic readers" (vi). With such an audience in mind, Demastes has minimized the number of footnotes throughout the text, but the documentation is still adequate. The book begins with a useful chronology of the performances of all of Guare's plays, followed by a list of honors and awards he has won. Guare's plays are then discussed in ten chapters, followed by a brief conclusion, a fairly extensive bibliography, and what appears to be a weak index that includes mostly proper nouns but does not classify the information into subject categories. In each chapter in which the individual plays are discussed, Demastes provides production histories, critical reviews of performances, plot summaries, and information about the form and structure of the plays. His critical perspectives on the plays are succinct and astute.

Chapter 1 provides a detailed chronology of Guare's personal and professional life, including information about the production history of the plays. Although Guare's diverse plays have been difficult to classify with regard to standard forms of drama, Demastes sets the tone for the remainder of the book by arguing that the playwright's career has been a conscious attempt to break the fourth wall of realist/naturalist kitchen-sink drama. He contends that European absurdism after World War II provided the roots for Guare's theatre, while admitting that Guare's plays are not as iconoclastic as the more nihilistic Theatre of the Absurd.

Chapter 2 is mainly plot summary of the short experimental drama—most notably Muzeeka, CopOut, and Home Fires—that Guare wrote prior to The House of Blue Leaves, his first full-length play. Chapter 3 delves into House, which is paired chronologically with his musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. In chapter 4, Demastes tackles the theatre that Guare wrote in the 1970s, including Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Rich and Famous, Landscape of the Body, and Bosoms and Neglect, followed by the one-act In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes. Although critics duly noted the muddled structure of Marco Polo, Demastes makes good sense of the play's content, persuasively arguing that it is about individuals feeding their egos, or singing their solos. Rich and Famous, like House, is characterized as self-entrapment by one's dreams and fantasies. The quirky plays Landscape of the Body and Bosoms and Neglect are discussed as idealistic searches to find stability in a family life that is expected to be glamorous and without neglect in its relationships. The first half of the book concludes with a chapter on Guare's highly touted screenplay for Atlantic City, a film directed by Louis Malle about an aging fantasist mobster who befriends an opportunistic cocktail waitress in Atlantic City; the two of them share a brief life of illusion in a decaying American city crumbling amid a world of drugs, prostitution, and gambling.

Chapter 6 covers the Lydie Breeze trilogy and A Few Stout Individuals. Demastes's analysis of the trilogy, which Guare restructured after his initial conception, makes a...