Since his early days, Guare has adhered to the fundamental principle of traditional dramaturgy—the need for a recognizable plot. However unconventional his treatment of the story line, there is an implicit understanding of the basic situation as relevant to some aspect of our lives. Be it the social tragedy of individuals (Muzeeka), or the personalized sufferings of people cast far afield in an alien world (Marco Polo Sings a Solo), Guare's plays situate their themes amidst the shifting realities of contemporary, life.

Born and raised in New York City, Guare is acutely aware of the many problems that face urban man. In their manic ferocity and ceaseless action, his plays hold a mirror up to the landscape of a city. Down-and-out characters, forever arguing or complaining about lost opportunities, inhabit shabby middle-class dwellings and display extreme forms of urban paranoia (The House of Blue Leaves). Clinging desperately to dreams of a better life, they continually chase after their visions, only to be drawn deeper and deeper into frustration and despair (Rich and Famous). More often than not, they express their anguish through senseless violence or festering hate.

For Guare, life in the city is virtually synonymous with the macabre and the violent (The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year). Horrific and bizarre incidents clutter the plays, and even when the dramatic situations are preposterous, they seldom stray from the realistic premise on which they are grounded. Although danger lurks at every corner, and events unfold without, the least provocation, there is a sense that such things belong to normal everyday life. A kind of playwright-journalist, Guare's dramatic inventions flesh out stories that one might easily come across in the pages of the Daily News or New York magazine (Landscape of the Body).

True to the urban spirit, Guare's characters are extremely resilient and ironic in their approach to life (Something I'll Tell You Tuesday). They confront their problems head-on, with much gusto and an eye for the heroic. Even when they fail, as they inevitably do, their efforts elicit a sympathy which lends a poignancy to their banal existences, and tempers the parody which is implied in their characterizations.

Typical of the intensity of urban life, Guare's plays advance through a series of short scenes, and the action is direct and concentrated (Cop-Out). Characters are swiftly sketched with a keen ear for dialogue, and their paranoia is always underscored by a sharp wit and stinging humor. They are set into motion through an unending series of chance encounters which, at times, borders on farce (The House of Blue Leaves). Complementing this approach to character and events is Guare's theatrical style, which is also one of pitfalls and surprises. Normal conversations easily give way to song, and characters frequently break away to converse directly with the audience. Rapid changes in mode of presentation are common, with flashbacks, flash forwards, continual cross cutting, and assorted movie techniques (that urban art form) used to create a stage picture of sometimes dazzling virtuosity (Rich and Famous, Marco Polo Sings a Solo). And, finally, there is music and song—those necessary adjuncts to Guare's theatrical vision—which lend to all his plays the feel of show-biz material as crafted by a playwright reared on the fringes of commercial theatre. (pp. 41-2)

Partly because of their brevity, Something I'll Tell You Tuesday and The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year fail to provide enriching dramatic experiences. The characters lack complexity, and the little that is known of them is exploited largely to illustrate Guare's ideas about contemporary violence and the whittling away of human emotions. Not until Muzeeka was his vision comfortably accommodated in dramatic form. (p. 44)

In both content and style, Muzeeka is Guare's homage to the political plays of Bertolt Brecht. As Argue's name suggests, antithetical social and political issues are presented as arguments. The protagonist is a victim of social forces, and his various encounters are duplicated in reverse to show two sides of the issue in question. (p. 45)

Muzeeka is Guare's finest accomplishment to date. In it, he found a form to accomodate his unruly vision. The characters are well integrated into their milieus, the play's language is less "throwaway," and its humor builds upon itself to create a concise and demanding vision of human affairs.

While Muzeeka focuses on the victims of society, Cop-Out concerns itself with the life of the victimizer. Its hero is a policeman whose life is presented from two varying perspectives. In one, he is depicted as an average person who, in the line of duty, meets a young woman and falls in love. Alternating with this is his other life, more violent and brutal, where he is transformed into Brett Arrow, a macho, screen image of a trigger-happy cop. (p. 46)

Cop-Out is not as tightly structured as the thematically similar Muzeeka. The ending is gratuitous, and only serves to give credence to Guare's theme of the impossibility of lives trying to connect. There is very little depth to the characters, who are portrayed mostly as emblematic figures. The action, although vigorous and humorous at times, drifts aimlessly from one absurd situation to another. There is much talk about the abuses of power and corruption, but Cop-Out fails to offer any clues to the underlying structure of American culture.

With The House of Blue Leaves, Guare enters a new phase in his career. In this, his first full-length play, characters are no longer possessed with grandiose notions about changing the face of society. The cynicism of the sixties gives way to the despondency of the seventies. Average middle-class people desperately try to break away from the stifling confines of their environments. (pp. 46-7)

The House of Blue Leaves is a good example of Guare's penchant for a bizarre grouping of events, and his demonic sense of comedy. Vicious in its irony, the play's irreverent jibes at religion, faith in miracles, upward mobility, and human pretensions add up to a virulent parody of a world where appearances are deceiving and life is lived according to the dictates of chance. These themes will surface again in the structurally more cohesive Landscape of the Body….

From the constricted milieu of The House of Blue Leaves, Guare moves on, in Marco Polo Sings a Solo, to a solitary and rarefied island in the Norwegian sea…. Marco Polo is bewildering in its complexity, and like the icebergs which comprise the backdrop to the McBride living room, most of its action remains obscure.

The little that can be gleaned from Guare's parable of a new world in the making strongly contrasts with his usual interpretation of human nature. (p. 48)

Ultimately, Marco Polo can hardly resurrect itself from the dying embers to form a cohesive statement on anything. A flamboyantly self-indulgent piece of writing, it is sadly lacking in wit, although the visual humor is at times quite funny…. The weakest play in the Guare canon, Marco Polo Sings a Solo can safely be read, to no great loss, under flashes of lightning.

Rich and Famous finds Guare back on home turf, this time playing to the hilt his idiosyncratic talent for comic irony. (p. 49)

In moments of this outrageous comedy, Guare is at this satirical best, but what remains buried in the continuous and shifting action of the play's feverish movement is who or what is being satirized. His irrepressible urge to parody everything results in a compendium of one-liners and reversals in positions that are ultimately tedious….

Violence, conspicuously absent or muted in Guare's last two plays, returns in its most grotesque in Landscape of the Body…. Using fade-ins and fade-outs, Guare once again evokes a dream world where participants in the drama appear from and disappear into the darkness. The sharp pangs of memory and guilt crowd the stage in a vague replica of lives lived under the shadow of death, destruction, and New York City. (p. 50)

A far more despairing play than his earlier works, Guare's Dickensian portrait of life in New York is indeed bleary—characters are left with no other alternatives but to search out the ignoble as a way of life. (p. 51)

Guare leads us to believe that there is some underlying gravity to [Landscape of the Body],… but such is hardly the case. As with many of the speeches the playwright puts in his characters' mouths, they come straight out of left field. Having virtually nothing to do with the plot, they argue for a complexity in the character, which is also misleading. At best a well-structured murder plot, the play's momentary diversions belong not to the characters but to Guare himself. Rosalie's final speech, where she echoes Guare's philosophy of human existence for the umpteenth time—"Only the tast of blood to remind us we ever existed"—could hardly be mouthed by the flippant and reckless character she is made out to be.

The odd note, mostly a terse and cryptic statement on Life, inevitably surfaces in all of Guare's plays. Unfortunately, he is not a deep enough thinker to warrant our attention to his philosophic speculation. A director's and actor's playwright (and, onstage, Guare's plays are full of energy and life), he is at his best when orchestrating the fury and anguish of his urban characters. Although many of his plays are overwritten and dialogue pivots on the banal, there is a wit that relieves the tedium of his artificial plots and insistence on the violent and macabre. As in TV sitcoms, Guare's pungent dramatic pen lets loose a barrage of insults, jokes, and puns, all of which make for entertaining theatre but prove fatally shallow on reading and close inspection. Muzeeka remains his artistic pinnacle. Perhaps Guare might do better reverting to the one-act play form, where his intensity in characterization and approach to plot are better suited. (pp. 51-2)