By Bob Fischbach, Omaha World-Herald
The last time playwright John Guare was in Nebraska, in 1964, he got a traffic ticket.
"They took all my money. I spent three days at the Lincoln YMCA waiting for money to get wired to me," Guare said Wednesday by phone from New York.
Saturday and Sunday he´ll be in Omaha for public appearances in connection with "Six Degrees of Separation." Guare´s 1990 play opened Thursday at the Blue Barn Theatre, and its 1993 movie version is being screened at noon Sunday on the Fort Omaha campus of Metropolitan Community College.
Guare has won an Obie ("Muzeeka," 1968) and the best-play award from the New York Drama Critics´ Circle ("House of Blue Leaves," 1971). "Six Degrees of Separation" won both. He earned a 1983 Oscar nomination for his "Atlantic City" screenplay, and six Tony nominations, winning for the book of the musical "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
Saturday, Guare will introduce "Six Degrees" at the Blue Barn and take questions afterward. He'll also talk after Sunday´s free movie screening, in Building 7 at Metro. The film stars Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, Will Smith and Ian McKellen.
But that´s not the reason he´s here.
"Jody McDowell is an extraordinary friend to playwrights," Guare said. "She asked me to come. I rarely come see productions of my plays, though this is a nice coincidence."
Guare met McDowell through playwright Edward Albee and the annual playwriting conferences McDowell held in Alaska before becoming president of Metro in 2005. The conference moved with McDowell to Omaha last year, but Guare has a schedule conflict for this year´s May 26 to June 2 event. He agreed to come now instead.
"Six Degrees" is about Paul, a young man taken in by a wealthy Manhattan art dealer and his wife, Flan and Ouisa Kittredge. Paul says he´s the son of actor Sidney Poitier and a friend of the Kittredges´ children, students at Harvard.
Guare said he wrote the play after seeing a news item about a young man like Paul, who claimed to be Poitier´s son.
The item percolated in Guare´s mind for six years.
"I was writing a play about something else," he said. "Suddenly these characters started appearing. You have to be ready to catch the play when it comes. My subconscious, unbeknownst to me, had been working overtime on figuring out how to make this a play."
That´s why, he said, writers must "break their backs working every day," so they´re ready when inspiration hits.
"Only occasionally does life hand over a few gifts," he said.
"Six Degrees," like all Guare´s plays, is dense with ideas, contrasting comic invention with human failure, cruelty with compassion. It touches on urban isolation, manners, class and race. Yet Guare insists he writes out of characters, not ideas.
"When plays started, the characters were masked," he said. "It was about finding the truth behind that mask. That hasn´t changed."
Guare´s articulate, intellectually alert characters often directly address the audience, breaking the theater´s imaginary fourth wall.
Dave Wingert and Brenda O´Brien play the Kittredges, and Kelcey Watson is Paul. The play runs 90 minutes without intermission and contains brief nudity. A few seats remain for Saturday, when Guare will appear. Curtain time is 8 p.m. Saturday only.