New york stories; His play Six Degrees Of Separation spawned the

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 13, 2003 | by Andrew Burnet

Where would Kevin Bacon be without John Guare? It was Guare who wrote the 1990 play Six Degrees Of Separation, which explores the idea that any two individuals in the United States can be linked by just five intermediaries. The play is a satire of social exclusion and snobbery, in which a young black man inveigles himself into the bosom of a swanky white Manhattan household. Fred Schepisi's film version, released in 1993, gave Will Smith his first starring role and - thanks to a game it inspired - accorded Kevin Bacon a special cult status. The challenge was this: connect any actor to Kevin Bacon in a maximum of six movies.

The degrees-of-separation theory is fascinating, but it is not Guare's own. It was popularised in the 1960s by an American psychologist called Stanley Milgram; but according to Guare, its roots are older. "The notion started with Marconi after the world became connected by the wireless," he says. "It's not metaphysical, it's statistical." It seems someone worked out how many radio stations would have to broadcast a message to reach everyone in the country, and arrived at the figure 5.82.

Now 65, Guare is a New Yorker who has been a playwright for four decades. And this week, four of his short plays will be given a rare airing by the Community Company at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, under the umbrella title New York Actor.

The title play, which appeared in 1998, is by far the most recent. It's also the easiest to interpret, a send-up of the vapidity and self-doubt of that beleaguered breed. Its central event is an excruciating encounter between a fawning actor and a theatre critic. "They exist in a parallel universe and I think you have to keep it that way," says Guare. When the critic's wife loses her purse, the drama takes on a bizarre twist.

It has this in common with A Day For Surprises, written for the cafe-theatres that sprang up in Greenwich Village in 1963-4. In this play, a librarian appears to have been eaten by a stone lion. "There are two famous lions guarding the New York Public Library," explains Guare. "I just always assumed that at night they roamed around - and why wouldn't they?"

The unfortunate bookworm, it transpires, had a clandestine tryst with a colleague, who abruptly transfers his affections elsewhere. "What's desperate is that the feelings don't go away," says Guare. "They are so powerful that they have to land somewhere. We're all like these planes running on empty looking for a landing strip. It's really about how precious they are and about the precariousness of life. How its thread can snap at any moment."

And it is strangely touching, a quality shared by both the other plays. The Loveliest Afternoon Of The Year is a tender but tragic love story, which Guare wrote at two o'clock in the morning on the day he was due to join the Air Force. "I was so nervous I couldn't sleep," he recalls.

This may account for the male character's horror of a jealous wife toting a blue rifle, but Guare refutes the suggestion that the man is a fantasist. "The point is that it's real," he says. "Life is more outrageous than any fantasy could be. Fantasy makes reality bearable, because reality is so overwhelming that it's easier for people to say, Oh, that's just not true.'"

The most tender of the four is probably Something I'll Tell You Tuesday, which Guare wrote while studying drama at Yale, at the start of the 1960s. The story of an elderly couple preparing for a possibly terminal trip to hospital, it is, he says, an affectionate tribute to his parents. "It's a play I've been drawing on all my life," he adds. "It's been a real toolbox for me."

Trying to trace common themes through Guare's work is not easy. For example, he has two separate links with the Catholic church: his Irish roots and his wife's post as president of the American Academy of Rome. These connections certainly informed one of his most successful plays, The House Of Blue Leaves (1971) - in which a young man attempts to assassinate the Pope - and its sequel Chaucer In Rome (2001).

"These are not devotional plays," he notes drily.

He also has an abiding interest in films about newspapers. Last year, he adapted Sweet Smell Of Success as a stage musical; and he's just begun work in London with Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, on a stage version of His Girl Friday. "Papers are our bridge into the world," he says. "I start my day off with them. The power of the press is with us every moment, even when we're not aware of it."

Musicals are nothing new to Guare, either. One of his early successes was a musical version of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen Of Verona, a hit on Broadway in 1971. In fact, the heightened theatricality of musicals goes straight to the heart of Guare's praxis. One thing all his works have in common is a rejection of commonplace naturalism. "I like actors who are performers," he says. "My work has to be performed with a certain verve, a certain larger- than-life quality."

Let's look elsewhere for common threads, shall we? John Guare wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's Atlantic City, which starred Susan Sarandon (1). She also starred in Light Sleeper with Willem Dafoe (2). He appeared in Wild At Heart with Nicolas Cage (3). Cage starred in Captain Corelli's Mandolin opposite Penelope Cruz (4). Penelope Cruz co-starred in Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise (5). And Cruise co-starred in A Few Good Men with - guess who? - Kevin Bacon.