John Guare is something of a paradox in the American theatre. He has been writing plays for forty years, more than thirty of them professionally. His work has been staged on and off Broadway. He is not only prolific but, in his early works, frequently wildly inventive and extremely funny. He has had a number of significant successes, picked up awards and established himself as a familiar part of the American theatrical scene. Yet if critics have sometimes been exhilarated they have also occasionally been baffled, and he has never quite established himself in the canon, except, perhaps, for The House of Blue Leaves, from the early seventies, and his 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. He has been called the Jackson Pollock of playwrights, a recognition of the wildness of a talent which splashes itself apparently randomly as well as of the vibrancy and energy of his work. He has equally well been accused of diffuseness and self-indulgence, of a failure to shape the apparent spontaneity of his invention into fully coherent drama.

It is hard to agree. Few writers have matched his exuberant inventiveness but few have aspired to, or achieved, the lyrical intensity or intellectual astuteness of a man with a vivid sense of the physical and linguistic possibilities of theatre. Acknowledged as a moralist, he has nonetheless been chided for burying his social and ethical critique in plays whose roots fail to sink deep enough into the human psyche. Initially a comic writer, a farceur, he has been seen as deflecting his moral concerns into extravagant physical actions or dispersing them in a deluge of language and bizarre plotting.