Lydie Breeze. - Softcover

John Guare is the author of numerous plays, including: Six Degrees of Separation (New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play), and The House of Blue Leaves (New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play). His film work includes the Oscar-nominated Atlantic City, (New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics Circle Awards for best screenplay.)

Guare's plays are customarily both a pleasure to read and good theater--a trick he manages by balancing the demands of literature and of drama. In his well-structured, well-written plays, there are wonderful wordplay and characters as compelling and real as those in a good novel. Yet Guare never loses sight of the obligation of drama to be, because of the requirements of performance, more efficient than novels. In the epic, two-part Lydie Breeze, he packs 20 years into approximately five hours of stage time, and you never feel he has stinted on storytelling. His account of a likable but misguided group of Civil War veterans, who want to create a perfect society but run afoul of human nature, is spare but never anorexic. Like a Zen painter, Guare delivers just enough information to keep an audience engaged and drive the story forward. Consisting of two previously produced full-length plays, Gardenia and Lydie Breeze, welded into a seamless whole, this new Lydie Breeze is wonderful theater and satisfying, compelling reading. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved