The bizarre is almost commonplace in John Guare's plays. Consider the stone lions that devour librarians in his one-act play, "A Day for Surprises." Or the sex-change character who, having been inseminated with his own sperm, gets to both father and mother a child in "Marco Polo Sings a Solo."

But real life also has a way of creeping into Guare's plays. In 1983, the playwright was having dinner in London with his friends Osborn Elliott, then dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and his wife, Inger, a former photojournalist. "Wait till you hear what happened to us," the Elliotts told him.

The couple proceeded to relate the tale of a young black con artist who won their trust and that of several other prominent New Yorkers by claiming he was the son of actor Sidney Poitier.

"It was just fantastic," Guare explained from his Greenwich Village apartment earlier this month. "Oddly enough, I didn't write it down."

The story stuck with him, however. Several years later, "I was writing something else and I suddenly found myself writing this," he recalls.

"This" is Guare's 1990 play, "Six Degrees of Separation," which is being produced at Center Stage by the Maryland Stage Company, the resident professional theater company of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, beginning Tuesday.

Celebrity worship, the quest for fame, the thin line between fantasy and reality, troubled parent-child relationships and the need to connect are some of the typical Guare themes that crop up in "Six Degrees." A play that intermingles the issues of race, class, identity and high-stakes art dealing, it is an intensely American work. And like most of Guare's plays, it moves fluidly between the extremes of comedy and tragedy.

Bestowing honors

At 61, Guare has built a body of work that includes 1971's "The House of Blue Leaves"; the Tony Award-winning book for the 1971 musical, "Two Gentlemen of Verona"; the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Louis Malle's 1980 movie, "Atlantic City"; and the screenplay for Fred Schepisi's 1993 film adaptation of "Six Degrees."

Described by fellow playwright Wendy Wasserstein as "the Life Force of the American Theater," and by Vogue magazine as "America's leading intellectual playwright," Guare was honored by being the 1998-1999 featured playwright at New York's Signature Theater, which focuses on one playwright each season (his predecessors have included Edward Albee, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard).

"The whole year was nothing like I expected -- and a remarkable experience," Guare says, reflecting on his three-play Signature lineup, which began with "Marco Polo" (his 1973 offbeat turn-of-the-millennium comedy about a film director, an astronaut and the above-mentioned transsexual) and "Bosoms and Neglect" (his 1979 play about a man's relationship with his cancer-stricken mother and with one of his fellow psycho-therapy patients).

"I described [the Signature season] like being in an Oliver Sacks episode -- like coming out of a coma and saying, 'I'm still in rehearsal with this?' " he kids.

Always the playwright

The season was supposed to culminate with Guare's "Lydie Breeze" plays, a series he began two decades ago about a utopian community in 19th-century Nantucket.

When budgetary considerations ruled that out, he went back to two of his short pieces from the 1960s and reworked them into a new play called "Lake Hollywood," which takes place at a New Hampshire lakeside resort in the 1940s as well as the present day. "I never put a play together so quickly," he says.

Maybe not, but putting plays together is something this native New Yorker has been doing since he was 11 years old. Back then, he wrote three short plays and convinced a friend that they could get written up in Life magazine if they staged the plays in the friend's Long Island garage and donated the proceeds to orphans. Life ignored them, but the local newspaper sent a photographer. And Guare's parents rewarded him with a typewriter on his next birthday.

His parents -- who were both stage-struck -- continued to encourage their only child. His father, a Wall Street clerk who hated his job, had once been an office boy for George M. Cohan. "He loved it. Then his family found out about it and made him quit," Guare says. His mother had two uncles in vaudeville and always hoped to join their act, but "she wasn't allowed to ... because only bad girls went into show business," he explains.

His mother also kept hoping that she would be "discovered" by her brother, Billy Grady, who was head of casting for MGM. When Guare was a child, he harbored a similar hope. His uncle was visiting the family while scouring the country for a boy to play Huckleberry Finn. No sooner did Grady arrive than young John burst into a full-scale audition.

Useful humiliation

"You never told me I had an idiot for a godchild," said his uncle (who was also the man responsible for the now-legendary assessment of Fred Astaire: "Can't sing, can't act, can dance a little.") Guare incorporated the entire devastating Huckleberry Finn incident into "The House of Blue Leaves." "I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives," the playwright wrote in the introduction to the published script.

Guare still has the Royal typewriter his parents gave him for his 12th birthday. He used it until a dozen years ago, when he switched to a computer. His first drafts, however, are written in longhand, at the kitchen table, before being transcribed into the computer. "Then I print that up and hand-write all over that, then type in rewrites, also on the computer. It's the computer and the quill," he says.

Guare is currently in Italy, where his wife, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, is president of the American Academy in Rome.

The trip -- one he makes several times a year -- is handy because the play he is now working on is titled "Chaucer in Rome." An account of various modern pilgrims visiting Rome, it will be produced at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts later this summer.

He's also writing the book for a musical based on the 1957 movie, "The Sweet Smell of Success," about power and corruption in the world of show business. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the musical will have a score by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Craig Carnelia.

Musicals hold a hallowed place in Guare's heart. He attributes much of his knowledge of dramatic structure to the record jackets of Broadway cast albums, which he read religiously when he was growing up, noting, for example, the way the opening songs reveal the characters' objectives.

Five decades after staging his first show in his friend's garage, Guare is living the life his parents were denied.

In "Six Degrees of Separation," Ouisa, the female protagonist, asks, "How do we keep the experience?" Guare has found the answer in theater, or, more generally, the arts. "That's what art does, it stops time," he says.

Guare believes theater, at its best, can serve as a rehearsal for real life. "We can say, 'I know what this is like. I've been there. I saw that in that play, that novel.' That's why it's the oldest art. People want to say, 'I want to know how I'll behave in those heightened moments in life -- stress and agony and pain -- so when I get there, I know what life has to offer.' "

'Six Degrees of Separation' Where: Maryland Stage Company at Center Stage, Head Theater, 700 N. Calvert St.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays; matinees 2 p.m. June 27, July 3, July 10-11. Through July 11

Tickets: $16 ($13 preview 8 p.m. Tuesday)

Call: 410-481-6500

Pub Date: 06/20/99