CHAUCER IN ROME  

The fun in a John Guare play usually stems from his satirical sense of comedy and creation of bizarre characters who represent aspects of society he is ridiculing. "Chaucer in Rome" is similar if more ragged than his more sharply honed work, such as

"The House of Blue Leaves" and "Six Degrees of Separation." But a Guare play however flawed is more amusing than most, and this one is alive with funny ideas and characters to match. It is very talky and that inevitably puts some people off. Although hardly in the same league, Guare in some respects writes like George Bernard Shaw. Guare is more concerned with unleashing ideas than with concentrating on traditional play structure.

In this fanciful comedy set in Rome in the year 2000, Matt (Jon Tenney), a successful artist in residence at the American Academy, learns that the cancer found in him has been eliminated by surgery, but his new lease on life is shattered with the information he can no longer use the paints with which he has earned his reputation because they contain cancer-causing elements. His lover Sarah (Carrie Preston), a scholar, and his close friend Pete (Bruce Norris), also a scholar, try to cheer him with their confidence that he'll find an alternate method to continue being an artist. Before Guare is through, Matt and Sarah will have teamed in a video ploy that becomes the hot art commodity of the moment (think all of the junk you can usually see at the Whitney), and with devastating effects on those who have been callously used for the sake of Matt's new art.

"Chaucer in Rome," under Nicholas Martin's fluid direction, is very free in form, with the leading cast members stopping to talk directly to the audience, which works well in the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater of Lincoln Center. The year in which the play is set being the Vatican's holy year that brought pilgrims to Rome from throughout the world, Guare seizes the opportunity to mine comedy from the flow of those coming to be blessed. Lee Wilkof is uproariously funny as the Yiddish-spouting Father Shapiro who shepherds the flock and finds it refreshing to encounter anyone who doesn't give a damn about religion.

Polly Holliday and Dick Latessa as Dolo and Ron, the parents from whom Pete has fled to Rome, turn up as major characters and at first are very funny as the sort of Americans who bring their own food abroad. But some dark revelations lie ahead to be uncovered, and they become tragic figures as well. Guare lets the witty observations fly furiously in the fast-paced dialogue, and some ideas strike on target, while others miss or get lost in the shuffle. But the author manages to skewer art, critics, pretentiousness, television, religion, the clergy, pilgrims, ego and assorted foibles. He serves a heady mix, and the way to best approach it is to forget about requiring dramatic perfection but enjoy those Guare nuggets that are downright funny and lethal.

JOHN GUARE
Chaucer in Rome and The House of Blue Leaves
 

A prize-winning playwright's masterwork and his brilliant sequel.

In John Guare's classic play The House of Blue Leaves (winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play), the Pope is visiting New York, and eighteen-year-old Ronnie goes AWOL from the army to come home to New York and blow up the Pope as he passes his house. In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, Guare reverses the situation. It is the Holy Year of 2000, and Ron and his wife come to Rome to search for their son. And with his inimitable wit and understanding, Guare has written a scathingly funny satire on the warping hunger for fame, the moral pollution and desperation in the worship of icons, both religious and secular, and the betrayal involved in creating art.

"With Chaucer in Rome Guare makes us become voyeurs even as we scorn voyeurism-thus offering a titillating, troubling commentary on life." USA Today.

"There may not be a stranger-or more intriguing-play in New York than Chaucer in Rome, John Guare's expansive rumination on art, religion, and the price one pays for celebrity." Michael Kuchawa, AP

"Guare's most disciplined, merciless yet lovable work since Six Degrees of Separation and maybe his best yet." Linda Winer, Newsday

"Splendid, a joyful affirmation of life and of John Guare's artistry. Mr. Guare is in a class by himself." The New York Times

"A woozy, fragile, hilarious heartbreaker. The writing is lush with sad, ironic wisdom about fame, love, and deluded values." USA Today

John Guare is the author of numerous plays, including Lydie Breeze (available in an Overlook/Tusk paperback), Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (Tony Award nomination for best play). His film work includes the Oscar-nominated Atlantic City, which won New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics Circle Awards for best screenplay.

He lives in New York City.

A CurtainUp Berkshires Review
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer :

Chaucer In Rome

While Mr. Guare has been quoted as saying he never wants to look back, Chaucer In Rome, casts more than a cursory look over its shoulders to his first big hit The House of Blue Leaves. Pete and his parents are not named Shaughnessy (the family name of the Queens family in Blue Leaves) for nothing. The Schaughnessy parents (Polly Holliday and Jerry Hardin) are all the stereotypes of ordinary people living in ordinary places rolled into one dysfunctional (to put it mildly) family. The New York City neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens near the Bliss Street subway seems to have been named to satisfy Mr. Guare's penchant for word play designed to show the darkness lurking beneath such idylically named places. Where in Blue Leaves the zany doings were set in motion by the Pope's visit to New York (and the Shaughnessy son's determination to kill him), the new play brings their literary kinfolk to Rome along with the other Holy Year pilgrims -- in their case a double search, for the son who has run as far from them as possible as well as a clean slate for their sins (once again tied to the killing instinct).

Chaucer In Rome has the all of Guare's hallmarks -- the goofy detours into absurdism, the deeply black humor, lengthy discussions offering at once bizarre and profound views generously spiced with aphorisms. Like the good news/bad news of Matt's cancer surgery, it is not a 100% yes or no experience. The play leans too heavily on characters as narrators, the absurdist detours tend to undercut the major theme of people caught up in a crassly materialistic culture.

The Rome setting and the interplay of Holy Week pilgrimages with the career pilgrimages made to the Academy of Rome is enough fun to make the darkness of the comedy very easy to take and, until you reflect on its implications, enjoy. The playwright who is married to a key figure of the Academy clearly knows his way around the art world, which does not keep him from taking sly swipes at its insularity and elitism.
Nicholas Martin, whose superb direction made Bosoms and Neglect the highlight of this year's Signature Theater John Guare Season, proves himself once again well-attuned to steering the roller-coaster plot developments. The pilgrims who serve as the play's chorus are never allowed to step over the line of being background figures. Their periodic appearance is orchestrated to give a sense of many more than the four actors actually used. The staging is true to Guare's antipathy for kitchen sink dramas, but with just enough of a realistic veneer.