Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Guare, John (Vol. 14) - John Simon

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JOHN SIMON

[Bosoms and Neglect] consists of three levels that stubbornly refuse to blend, and are not worth much individually either….

[We] have the mother, psychiatry, and book levels that prove grotesque and outlandish but only very sparsely funny, and also unrelated and immiscible. Someone else might have put them believably together; in Guare's unsure grasp they fall apart like a card castle being built by a sufferer from Parkinson's disease. The play, moreover, fluctuates between the absurdist and the naturalistic, the scandalous and the would-be endearing, the obvious and the arcane. (p. 77)

John Simon, "Folie à deux," in New York Magazine (copyright © 1979 by News Group Publications, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of New York Magazine), Vol. 12, No. 21, May 21, 1979, pp. 76-8.∗

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1. Introduction
2. Edith Oliver
3. Harold Clurman
4. Stanley Kauffmann
5. Edith Oliver
6. Brendan Gill
7. Terry Curtis Fox
8. John Simon
9. Martin Gottfried
10. Copyright