House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - John Guare

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85 pages

English

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In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, it is the year 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, and the betrayal involved in creating art.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	01 juin 2002
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781468307825
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0705€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES and CHAUCER IN ROME are subject to royalties. Both are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage performing, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.
The stage performance rights in THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES and CHAUCER IN ROME are controlled exclusively by Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. No professional or non-professional performance of either play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the requisite fee. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to R. Andrew Boose, I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY 10017.
This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2011 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
N EW Y ORK: Overlook 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com
L ONDON: Duckworth 90-93 Cowcross Street London EC1M 6BF www.ducknet.co.uk info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk
First published in the United States in 2002 by The Overlook Press
The House of Blue Leaves copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972 by St. Jude Productions, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1996 by John Guare
Introduction to The House of Blue Leaves copyright © 1982 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Chaucer in Rome copyright © 2002 by John Guare
Afterword copyright © 2002 by John Guare
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-782-5
CONTENTS
Copyright
THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES
Introduction
Prologue
Act One
Act Two
CHAUCER IN ROME
Afterword
THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES
INTRODUCTION

The House of Blue Leaves takes place in Sunnyside, Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City. You have to understand Queens. It was never a borough with its own identity like Brooklyn that people clapped for on quiz shows if you said you came from there. Brooklyn had been a city before it became part of New York, so it always had its own identity. And the Bronx originally had been Jacob Bronck s farm, which at least gives it something personal, and Staten Island is out there on the way to the sea, and, of course, Manhattan is what people mean when they say New York.
Queens was built in the twenties in that flush of optimism as a bedroom community for people on their way up who worked in Manhattan but wanted to pretend they had the better things in life until the inevitable break came and they could make the official move to the Scarsdales and the Ryes and the Greenwiches of their dreams, the pay-off that was the birthright of every American. Queens named its communities Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Elmhurst, Woodside, Sunnyside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Astoria (after the Astors, of all people). The builders built the apartment houses in mock Tudor or Gothic or Colonial and then named them The Chateau, The El Dorado, Linsley Hall, the Alhambra. We lived first in The East Gate, then moved to The West Gate, then to Hampton Court. And the lobbies had Chippendale furniture and Aztec fireplaces, and the elevators had roman numerals on the buttons.
And in the twenties and thirties and forties you d move there and move out as soon as you could. Your young married days were over, the promotions came. The ads in the magazines were right. Hallelujah. Queens: a comfortable rest stop, a pleasant rung on the ladder of success, a promise we were promised in some secret dream. (The first paid commercial on American radio was Queensboro Management advertising apartments in Jackson Heights in 1922 on WEAF.) And isn t Manhattan, each day the skyline growing denser and more crenelated, always looming up there in the distance? The elevated subway, the Flushing line, zooms to it, only fourteen minutes from Grand Central Station. Everything you could want you d find right there in Queens. But the young marrieds become old marrieds, and the children come, but the promotions, the breaks, don t, and you re still there in your bedroom community, your life over the bridge in Manhattan, and the fourteen-minute ride becomes longer every day. Why didn t I get the breaks? I m right here in the heart of the action, in the bedroom community of the heart of the action, and I live in the El Dorado Apartments and the main street of Jackson Heights has Tudor-topped buildings with pizza slices for sale beneath them and discount radios and discount drugs and discount records and the Chippendale-paneled elevator in my apartment is all carved up with Love To Fuck that no amount of polishing can ever erase. And why do my dreams, which should be the best part of me, why do my dreams, my wants, constantly humiliate me? Why don t I get the breaks? What happened? I m hip. I m hep. I m a New Yorker. The heart of the action. Just a subway ride to the heart of the action. I want to be part of that skyline. I want to blend into those lights. Hey, dreams, I dreamed you. I m not something you curb a dog for. New York is where it all is. So why aren t I here?
When I was a kid, I wanted to come from Iowa, from New Mexico, to make the final break and leave, say, the flatness of Nebraska and get on that Greyhound and get off that Greyhound at Port Authority and you wave your cardboard suitcase at the sky: I ll Lick You Yet. How do you run away to your dreams when you re already there? I never wanted to be any place in my life but New York. How do you get there when you re there? Fourteen minutes on the Flushing line is a very long distance. And I guess that s what this play is about more than anything else: humiliation. Everyone in the play is constantly being humiliated by their dreams, their loves, their wants, their best parts. People have criticized the play for being cruel or unfeeling. I don t think any play from the Oresteia on down has ever reached the cruelty of the smallest moments in our lives, what we have done to others, what others have done to us. I m not interested so much in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. Chekhov says we must never humiliate one another, and I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.
This is how the play got written: I went to Saint Joan of Arc Grammar School in Jackson Heights, Queens, from 1944 to 1952 (wildly pre-Berrigan years). The nuns would say, If only we could get to Rome, to have His Holiness touch us, just to see Him, capital H, the Vicar of Christ on Earth—Vicar, V.I.C.A.R., Vicar, in true spelling-bee style. Oh, dear God, help me get to Rome, the capital of Italy, and go to that special little country in the heart of the capital— V.A.T.I.C.A.N.C.I.T.Y. —and touch the Pope. No sisters ever yearned for Moscow the way those sisters and their pupils yearned for Rome. And in 1965 I finally got to Rome. Sister Carmela! Do you hear me? I got here! It s a new Pope, but they re all the same. Sister Benedict! I m here! And I looked at the Rome papers, and there on the front page was a picture of the Pope. On Queens Boulevard. I got to Rome on the day a Pope left the Vatican to come to New York for the first time to plead to the United Nations for peace in the world on October 4, 1965. He passed through Queens, because you have to on the way from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. Like the Borough of Queens itself, that s how much effect the Pope s pleas for peace had. The Pope s no loser. Neither is Artie Shaughnessy, whom The House of Blue Leaves is about. They both have big dreams. Lots of possibilities. The Pope s just into more real estate.
My parents wrote me about that day that the Pope came to New York and how thrilled they were, and the letter caught up with me in Cairo because I was hitching from Paris to the Sudan. And I started thinking about my parents and me and why was I in Egypt and what was I doing with my life and what were they doing with theirs, and that s how plays get started. The play is autobiographical in the sense that everything in the play happened in one way or another over a period of years, and some of it happened in dreams and some of it could have happened and some of it, luckily, never happened. But it s autobiographical all the same. My father worked for the New York Stock Exchange, but he called it a zoo and Artie in the play is a zoo-keeper. The Billy in the play is my mother s brother, Billy, a monstrous man who was head of casting at MGM from the thirties through the fifties. The Huckleberry Finn episode that begins Act Two is an exact word-for-word reportage of what happened between Billy and me at our first meeting. The play is a blur of many years that pulled together under the umbrella of the Pope s visit.
In 1966 I wrote the first act of the play, and, like some bizarre revenge or disapproval, on the day I finished it my father died. The first act was performed at the O Neill Thea