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Playwright John Guare's genius lies in his ability to make his
plays more bizarre than real life, and considering the
competition -- Son of Sam, Anita Bryant, Tony Orlando --
that's no mean feat. Also impressive is his knack for finding
in even the most preposterous of circumstances an emotional
reality. Guare seems to cloak his characters in comic
exaggeration for the sheer pleasure of stripping them bare.
And he tricks us into thinking he's talking about some
outrageous other when all the while he's creeping up on our
deepest fears. We all like to believe we're in control of our
lives. We try to believe what we've been told about doing our
duty, making something of ourselves. But always there is the
nagging suspicion that we've been somehow fooled, that
everything we know is wrong. This uneasy sense permeates all
Guare's plays, but is perhaps most graphically illustrated in
his most recent, Landscape of the Body. It ends with a
woman's literally taking all the information she's assimilated
over the years and tossing it, piece by scribbled piece, into
the sea. "My life," she concludes, "is a
triumph of all the things I don't know."
The woman is also performing this cleansing ritual when the
curtain goes up on Landscape, but at that point we
don't know what it means. All we see is a pasty-faced,
raincoat-clad matron sitting, surrounded by her shopping bags,
on a ferry bound for Nantucket. She slips notes into tiny
bottles and furtively tosses them overboard. A man in a
trenchcoat stands at the railing trying to engage her in small
talk, but she doesn't respond. She wants to be alone: at any
rate, she refuses to gossip about the Kennedys with a stranger
wearing an obviously fake nose and mustache. He persists,
finally coaxing her into an exchange of trivia about the
Dionne quintuplets. Having won her momentary attention, he
beams with pride: "What attracted you to me first?"
This scene, as mentioned, reappears at the end of the evening.
But by that time the play has unraveled, all disguises have
been discarded, and what seemed a daffy, baffling encounter
between a bag lady -- one of Lily Tomlin's "urban
victims" -- and an ersatz Groucho is revealed as the
bleak aftermath of a chain of events that has devastated and
profoundly changed both parties. The masked man is Holohan, a
police detective who has tried to prove the woman, a
middle-aged divorcee named Betty, responsible for the grisly
murder of her 14-year-old son.
Most of Landscape of the Body consists of Holohan's
grueling interrogation of Betty and flashbacks reconstructing
her recent history. Betty had arrived in New York City, a
nervous innocent with her boy Bert in tow, to persuade her
estranged sister Rosalie to return to the family manse in
Maine. But Sis soon met a messy demise under the wheels of a
speeding bicycle -- after which she returned from the grave
with piano accompanist and silver lame wardrobe to set scenes,
sing songs and emcee the show, as if to prove that death, too,
is a cabaret. Betty, for reasons unexplained, took over
Rosalie's apartment, her part-time porno career and her job at
a sleazy firm specializing in bogus "honeymoon
holidays." This concern was run by an hysterical Hispanic
named Raulito, who augmented his three-piece business suit
with a '40s ruby-red evening gown, a "Rita Hayworth
special," because it made him feel "rich,
successful, out of the jungle."
Meanwhile, son Bert had fallen in with a pubescent punk named
Donny. Together they would lure gay men to vacant apartments,
hit them on the head with a monkey wrench and steal their
watches and wallets. When Betty's potential Prince Charming
arrived in the form of a wealthy Southerner, she went with him
to visit his Carolina estate. On her return to New York, she
found that Raulito was in the morgue, her decapitated son had
been fished from the Hudson, and she was the prime suspect.
Once cleared, she packs her possessions in paper bags and
flees the city -- bringing us back to the ridiculous reunion
on the ferry. Guare has punctured the cartoon coating, plunged
through layers alternating manic absurdity with savage
realism, and arrived at the play's core. What seemed at first
arbitrarily comic -- crazy lady flinging bottled messages into
briny deep -- turns out to be not only logical, but terribly
sad.
Like his other plays, Landscape is about discontented
people trying to escape unmanageable lives through dreams. In House
of Blue Leaves, Guare's first full-length work, zookeeper
Arnie Shaughnessy hopes to quit his dreary life and demented
wife for a glamorous career as a movie songwriter. Rich and
Famous depicts earnest young playwright Bing Ringling's
pursuit of Broadway superstardom and takes place on the
opening night of his first produced play, an
"autobiographical" adaptation of Dante's Divine
Comedy. Marco Polo Sings a Solo, an almost
Chekhovian study of the would-be chi-chi set on a fjord in the
year 1999, is about (among other things) screenwriter Stony
McBride's attempt to attain heroic stature vicariously through
intergalactic explorer Frank Schaeffer. Whereas the protagonist
in each of these plays seeks fulfillment through some explicit
public accomplishment, Landscape of the Body chronicles
a quest that is, as the title suggests, more personal. Betty's
search for clues to the mystery of her son's death becomes a
search for her own identity, the exploration of an interior
terrain as barren and as terrifying as any outer space.
When Landscape of the Body opened in New York, where it
is currently playing at the Public Theater, it met with the
mixed critical response which has become, for Guare, typical.
At 39, he may indeed be "the world's oldest living
promising young playwright" -- a line from Rich and
Famous, which is in part a satirical self-portrait. Though
Landscape is more ambitious than Rich and Famous
or House of Blue Leaves (Guare's least complicated
play and his most popular, apart from the book and lyrics he
provided for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona) and
more workable than the sprawling Marco Polo, the new
play reflects its author's usual problems. He tends to
overwrite; his attempts to combine the serious and the comic
sometimes result in bad jokes, and he peppers his work with
clever little songs and transitional monologues which make the
play seem all the more fragmented.
Yet, while none of his plays completely succeeds, Guare is too
inventive, both verbally and theatrically, to dismiss. His
wild imagination seems deliberately -- if sometimes
catastrophically -- set on a collision course with his grim
vision of a cruel and chaotic world. When these forces meet,
the result is a twisted, improbably, hilarious fusion of Tom
Stoppard and Martin Scorsese. Paradoxically, Guare's fevered
brain is his greatest asset and his worst enemy. Each
of his plays is stuffed with enough ideas to last most writers
a lifetime; but only a few can be developed. Guare must
realize by now (if he reads his reviews) that he could achieve
greater commercial success with simpler projects -- like House
of Blue Leaves. That he refuses to mend his ways, to fall
back on the things he knows he can handle, is at once perverse
and admirable.
Because no matter how unwieldy his plays are, Guare is saying
something important. More than any other contemporary American
playwright, he has zeroed in on our society's tendency to
confuse fantasy, reality and media hype. Guare's characters
have ingested the debris of modern culture so completely that
they are no longer capable of distinguishing between life and Let's
Make a Deal, happiness and headlines, truth and talk
shows. In House of Blues Leaves, Arnie's pathetic wife
mourns the fact that she knows more about Jackie Kennedy than
she knows about herself. (Our obsession with celebrities is a
current that also runs through the later plays.) In Rich
and Famous, Bing's childhood friend, now a movie star,
sells the rights to his spectacular suicide to Norman Mailer.
In Marco Polo, Stony's wife asks the maid for "a
diet fudge, diet soda, anything with diet in the title."
And in Landscape, a creepy young girl is so immersed in
lurid, National Enquirer-style death tales (like the
one about the black widow spiders in the beehive hairdo) that
she has no qualms about her own participation in a hideous
murder. (Guare's fiction turns out to be not far removed from
fact: consider the recent Florida defense of a young man
accused of murder, in which the crime was chalked up to the
defendant's having watched too much violence on television.)
The mortality rate in Landscape is unusually high, even
for Guare -- in fact, its gruesome quality may account for
some of the hostile reaction it has engendered. But the
multiple deaths are neither gratuitous nor burlesqued -- they
serve to underline Betty's helplessness against a world she
can't control. And the shift here from the characters'
reverence for media-fed junk culture to their concentration on
pulp-mag morbidity gives Landscape the kind of
cohesiveness Guare's past work has lacked. Until now, one was
more likely to remember his plays in terms of specific scenes:
the wife's fantasy monologue on Jackie Kennedy in Blue
Leaves, Bing's surreal confrontation with his parents in Rich
and Famous; the scene in Marco Polo where Stony
learns the truth about his virgin birth. But in Landscape
of the Body, Guare has succeeded in writing a play that,
no matter how much it falters along the way, impresses as a
whole. It may mark a crucial turning point in his career.
Boston Phoenix, November 1, 1977
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