John Guare ( ;; born February 5, 1938) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. Early life He was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 1949 his father suffered a heart attack and subsequently moved the family to Ellenville, New York while he recovered. His father's relatives lived there, making it an idyllic experience for him. Guare did not regularly attend school in Ellenville because the school's daily practices were not in keeping with the recommendations of the Catholic Church, causing his father to suspect the school had communist leanings. Instead of attending school, Guare was assigned home study and took exams intermittently, which allowed him time to go to the movies and see all the hits of the time. This had a lasting influence on Guare and his career. He attended Georgetown University and the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 1962 with a M.F.A in Playwriting. Under the direction of Georgetown's Donn B. Murphy, his play The Toadstool Boy, about a country singer's quest for fame, won first place in the District of Columbia Recreation Department's One-Act-Play competition. In 1960, the Mask and Bauble presented The Thirties Girl, a musical for which Guare did the book, much of the music and the lyrics, again under Murphy's tutelage. Set in Hollywood's turbulent 1920s, it deals with the dethronement of a reigning diva by a fresh-faced starlet. Career Guare's early plays, mostly comic one-acts exhibiting a flair for the absurd, include To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza, produced at Caffe Cino in 1965 and Muzeeka (1968). Cop-Out premiered on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on April 7, 1969 and closed on April 12, 1969, as part of two one-act plays, including Home Fires. Cop-Out starred Linda Lavin and Ron Leibman. The House of Blue Leaves, a domestic drama by turns wildly comic and despairingly poignant, premiered Off-Broadway in 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. It was revived Off-Broadway at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1986 before transferring to Broadway later in 1986. The play was revived on Broadway in 2011, starring Ben Stiller, whose mother, Anne Meara, had appeared in the 1971 production. According to Marilyn Stasio writing in Variety the play "sets the bar for smart comic lunacy." Chaucer in Rome, "said to be a sequel of