Writer’s Gift Measured by ‘Degrees’

NEW YORK —  “If you asked 50 people in the theater to name the top 10 American playwrights, all of them would have John Guare on their lists,” Gregory Mosher, the former artistic director of Lincoln Center Theatre, contends.

A longtime associate of Guare’s, Mosher, who now heads Circle-in-the-Square on Broadway, describes the 58-year-old playwright as “a magnificent writer” who, along with David Mamet, Sam Shepard and a handful of other dramatists, reshaped the face of contemporary American theater over the past quarter century.

Guare’s most famous play, “Six Degrees of Separation,” which is getting a top-drawer production at South Coast Repertory, originated at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater in 1990, moved to the Vivian Beaumont and became that rar ity, a nonmusical Broadway hit.

Critics have raved about it as both a definitive summation of the Reagan era and the quintessential New York play, unmatched for its satirical yettragic depiction of the city’s white upper crust, which is suddenly forced to look in the mirror by a black outsider who wants to be one of them.

In one of his rare paeans, Frank Rich, then the much-feared voice of thunder at the New York Times, exulted that “Six Degrees” was the awesome “fulfillment of a promise.”

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Anybody familiar with the arc of Guare’s prolific career might agree. He began some three dozen plays ago in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, where he had his first professional production, on a double bill with Shepard. But for all of Guare’s early successes and later triumphs, he has received considerably less attention from mainstream theatergoers, not to say the national press, than either Mamet or Shepard.

The tall, Manhattan-born playwright lives on 5th Avenue in a pre-World War II building with a sleek green canopy at the entrance, elegant brass doors and a doorman who delivers messages to each apartment by hand. Guare has been there for 20 years, married for the past 15 or so to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, who heads the internationally prestigious American Academy in Rome, the scholarly institute that gives the Prix de Rome awards in the arts.

Guare’s literary eminence notwithstanding--in 1989 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters elected him to its ranks--he is surprisingly accessible. Getting to meet him can be as easy as opening a can of tuna. You needn’t go through Sam Cohn, his fabled, high-powered agent at William Morris.

You just dial Guare at home. He will pick up and tell you to call back the day before you want to see him. There’s no sense making an appointment two weeks in advance, he explains, because he hasn’t the slightest idea of what he’ll be doing that far ahead.

One recent morning we agreed to meet later that afternoon at his favorite neighborhood hangout, the French Roast, a loud and busy cafe. It was jammed, mostly with women who had toddlers beside them or babies in strollers; some customers were students nose-deep in textbooks.

Guare materialized by the corner table I’d been lucky to get. He looked around for a moment and sat down. “This is a nice coincidence,” he said, rather pleased. “I always like to sit at this table.”

For openers, I asked about the current Broadway scene. What had he seen? Chris Durang’s “Sex and Longing,” starring Sigourney Weaver as a scantily clad nymphomaniac, had just been roundly panned.

Guare said he’d enjoyed the play and didn’t believe it deserved the critical blasts. “I just hope Chris doesn’t take them seriously,” he added. “I remember having little chats with him. He said he would never write another play as long as Walter Kerr [who recently died] was working.”

Guare ordered a decaf coffee.

“That’s why I never read reviews,” he said. “Can’t. I have a very visual memory. If I see something in print, it’s carved into my eyeballs.”

When he was a kid living at the beach, Guare recalled, he’d had a neighbor who’d written a Broadway play. It only ran nine performances.

“He never recovered from the reviews,” Guare said. “Too painful. I learned from that: You can’t let them put you to bed for the rest of your life.”

From the fit look of him and his relaxed but serious mien, Guare didn’t seem ready to do any lying down for anybody. His large face was tan, his iron-gray hair slicked down to his scalp and combed straight back. He had small, round, rimless glasses perched on his nose, giving him a scholarly air.

Perhaps Guare’s skepticism about reviews also came from the experience of his own first newspaper notice--at age 11. It certainly should have alerted him to the fickle, arbitrary nature of media judgments.

He and a neighborhood friend in Queens, where Guare grew up, had written a play together and wanted to stage it in a garage.

“We thought we should get a story about the play in Life magazine, with our pictures. I called up Time-Life from a phone booth and said, ‘There are these boys putting on a play, and it would be a good story.’

“A voice at the other end of the line said, ‘Whom do you want to speak to?’ Click.

“So we call up the local paper and said, ‘There are two boys down on Oswego Avenue, and they’re going to put on three plays and give all the money to the orphans of Long Beach.

“This time someone says, ‘Oh yeah?’ On the last performance a big black car came down the street. A photographer got out and took our pictures. We saw ourselves in print. My parents gave me a typewriter for my 12th birthday. I still have it.

“You see,” Guare added, “my father worked in Wall Street. He was a clerk. He hated it. He said, ‘Whatever you do, never get a job.’ I think I’ve fulfilled his dream.”

In fact, Guare had a theatrical family. Two grand-uncles toured in vaudeville from 1880 to 1917, he says, and his mother’s brother was head of casting at MGM from 1934 to 1956. His uncle’s adopted son--a midget who played a Munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz”--eventually became the model for Billy in “The House of Blue Leaves,” his 1971 breakthrough play.

The tale could serve, moreover, as a small demonstration of what Guare meant by “Six Degrees of Separation.” He borrowed the title not from some poetic concept of the world but from a simple question following Marconi’s development of wireless telegraphy in the 1890s.

Using the wireless during the early 1900s, which more or less instigated the 20th century notion of the global village, you could, Guare notes, reach any spot on the planet by connecting with an average of 5.82 stations. That’s about “six degrees” of separation.

This is not to say that poetry is six degrees away from theater. Guare points out that of all artists, playwrights are most like poets.

“The first plays were poems,” he said, with an emphatic pause. “Poems are lost speeches from plays. We just have the essence. A poem is always somebody speaking.”

Guare will not talk about anything he’s working on. He never does. But he does point out that he likes to work on more than one project at a time.

“I have to, otherwise it’s like being stuck in a one-room apartment,” he said. “With simultaneous projects, you have somewhere else to go. You can let whatever’s stuck simmer. I like to work.”

What he doesn’t like to do is go over old work--which is why he hasn’t gone to Costa Mesa for SCR’s revival of “Six Degrees.”

“Not interested. I’ve done it. When it was done in London, I was interested because it was an entirely different production. And it was fantastic to see the play in an entirely different environment, in a different style.”

(Although “Six Degrees” lost the Tony battle for best play to Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” the West End production in London won the Olivier Award in the same category.)

Guare doesn’t even like calling SCR’s production a revival.

“Because it’s not,” he said. “It’s a play that’s never stopped being done. A revival is something that’s brought back. ‘Six Degrees’ just has a life, and South Coast is part of it. Doing ‘Six Degrees’ at Lincoln Center was what allowed it to happen.”

Besides, he hates to leave New York because of its “nourishment” as the major source of his art.

“This city is always changing, always reinventing itself,” he said. “It’s always on the verge of suicide. It’s always Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It’s the end of the world and the first morning every day. I’ve lived here all my life, and it still surprises me.”

It also operates at high speed. Guare suddenly checks his watch. He has to be somewhere in minutes. Offering a gracious goodbye, he vanishes into the office crowds erupting from the subway on their way to dinner.

* “Six Degrees of Separation” continues through Nov. 17 on the South Coast Repertory Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $28-$41. (714) 957-4033.