Landscape of the Body: A Play
Dec 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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108
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About this ebook
Death, desire, and tabloid sensationalism converge in "this delirious heartbreaker of a comedy" by the Tony Award-winning playwright (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
Along with Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, Landscape of the Body is one of John Guare's most celebrated plays. It tells the story of a woman's unfulfilled life and premature death—and her reflections from the grave.
Betty Yearn first came to New York City to convince her sister Rosalie to leave the gritty urban world behind and come home to bucolic Maine. But when Rosalie dies in a freak bicycle accident, Betty returns to ease into her sister's previous persona—moving into her apartment, even taking over her job—as Rosalie watches from the beyond. Then Betty's fortunes take a jarring turn. After losing her teenage son to murder, she finds herself the primary suspect in the crime. After all, death does seem to have a way of following in her trail.
In what Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press called "his most surreal and haunting play," John Guare brilliantly moves back and forth in time and space to create an affecting study of the American dream gone awry.
Along with Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, Landscape of the Body is one of John Guare's most celebrated plays. It tells the story of a woman's unfulfilled life and premature death—and her reflections from the grave.
Betty Yearn first came to New York City to convince her sister Rosalie to leave the gritty urban world behind and come home to bucolic Maine. But when Rosalie dies in a freak bicycle accident, Betty returns to ease into her sister's previous persona—moving into her apartment, even taking over her job—as Rosalie watches from the beyond. Then Betty's fortunes take a jarring turn. After losing her teenage son to murder, she finds herself the primary suspect in the crime. After all, death does seem to have a way of following in her trail.
In what Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press called "his most surreal and haunting play," John Guare brilliantly moves back and forth in time and space to create an affecting study of the American dream gone awry.
Death, desire, and tabloid sensationalism converge in "this delirious heartbreaker of a comedy" by the Tony Award-winning playwright (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
Along with Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, Landscape of the Body is one of John Guare's most celebrated...
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About the author
Born of Irish Catholic parents in New York City, Guare was an only child. His parents led intense but somewhat separate lives and young Guare found himself increasingly alone as he grew up. He spent his childhood reading, listening to albums of Broadway musicals, and writing plays. His first play was presented in a neighbor's garage when he was eleven. Guare first came to public attention with his one-act play Muzeeka (1968), a biting social satire about an ambitious man who works for a canned-music company that inflicts its banal arrangements on the entire country. The hero, Jack Argue, is a modern guilt-ridden "Everyman" who has sold himself out to the system. The play was first performed at Connecticut's Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre, then at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. On April 28, 1968, it opened off-Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse on a double bill with Sam Shepard's Red Cross. Muzeeka ran for 65 performances and earned its author an Obie Award that year. The House of Blue Leaves (1971), Guare's first full-length play, is set in a Queens apartment on the day the Pope is making his first visit to New York City. A savage farce, The House of Blue Leaves presents an unrelenting attack on lower middle-class values. It shows the emptiness of the characters' inner lives and the horror of their senseless acts of violence. The play won both an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1971. In 1986 it enjoyed a highly successful revival at New York's Lincoln Center, which further established Guare as a unique and critically acclaimed American playwright. His more recent plays, such as Six Degrees of Separation (1990), show the playwright turning toward a more tragic outlook. Critics have been almost universal in their praise of Guare's screenplay for Louis Malle's film, Atlantic City (1981). Although not published in book form, the Canadian-French film has been distributed by Paramount in the United States. It is a bittersweet, Runyonesque tale about a small-time numbers runner, played by Burt Lancaster, and a small-town waitress, played by Susan Sarandon. Atlantic City received a number of honors, including best-screenplay awards by the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Society, and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Born of Irish Catholic parents in New York City, Guare was an only child. His parents led intense but somewhat separate lives and young Guare found himself increasingly alone as he grew up. He spent his childhood reading, listening to albums of Broadway musicals, and writing plays. His first play...
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