Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday

John Guare (b. 1938)
From John Guare: Plays

Interesting Links

Interview: “‘War on the Kitchen Sink’: Michael Paller on the Larger-Than-Life Plays of John Guare” (Library of America)

“Caffe Cino and Off-Off Broadway: Finding My Great-Grandfather in the Library for the Performing Arts” (Rachel Kahn, New York Public Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” Thornton Wilder
• “The Days of Jig Cook,” Djuna Barnes
• “Terry Helburn,” Frances Parkinson Keyes
• “Audience Tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea,” Elia Kazan

Buy the book
John Guare: Plays
The House of Blue Leaves
Rich and Famous
Atlantic City (screenplay)
Lydie Breeze Trilogy
Six Degrees of Separation
A Free Man of Color
10 other plays

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Entrance of Caffe Cino, 31 Cornelia Street, in the West Village of Manhattan, 1965. Photo by James D. Gossage. The poster advertises Lanford Wilson’s short play This Is the Rill Speaking. Guare’s first production there, A Day for Surprises, was staged in August 1965; Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday and The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year were performed as a double bill in October 1966. Image from NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project.

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Boris Karloff and Jean Arthur starred on Broadway in the 1950 Leonard Bernstein musical adaptation of Peter Pan, and John Guare, a stagestruck twelve-year-old boy from Queens, attended a performance. During the production, as John Lahr tells us in his introduction to the just-published Library of America volume of Guare’s plays, Arthur, cast as Peter Pan, approached the edge of the stage and “urged the audience to keep Tinkerbell alive by clapping.” Guare was stunned. “I wondered,” he recalled. “Did this happen at every performance or is this just now? It was so shocking the way she stopped the play and spoke to us. It was a revelation.”

His subsequent exposure to the plays of Thornton Wilder confirmed the dramatic possibilities presented by breaking the fourth wall. “I remember the revelation when, as a boy, I read Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The Stage Manager says: ‘See that boy. He will be killed in the war.’ And there’s no boy onstage, of course. So I realized you are not bound by four walls. That simple, direct address across the stage creates a whole life and death for an audience.”

From the very beginning of Guare’s career, Wilder was a major influence. In an introduction to a collection of Wilder’s shorter plays, Guare asked, “What do we do with this man who was a playwright, novelist, actor, teacher, musician, essayist, translator, adaptor, opera librettist and screenwriter (for what some people think is Hitchcock’s finest film, Shadow of a Doubt)?” He continued:

Thornton Wilder is so hard to get a handle on because he embodies the basic American dilemma. In the enormous mass of America, where do we go for experience?

One Thornton lived in Hamden, Connecticut, on Deepwood Drive with forays into New Haven for lunch and the library, and wrote about New Hampshire and New Jersey and Rhode Island. The other Thornton summoned up the Ice Age and Atlantic City in high extravagance, peopled with philosophers who spoke in ancient Greek and Latin and Hebrew, and wrote novels of ancient Rome, and traveled to Europe and America receiving prizes and acclaim.

“What Guare got from Wilder were practical ways to transfer into straight plays the theatricality he loved in the musicals he started seeing as a child,” remarked dramaturg Michael Paller in a recent interview. “He was attracted to plays that didn’t just imitate the way the surface of our everyday world looks, sounds, and operates.” Or, as Guare put it more bluntly to a New York Times critic in 1999, “Naturalism kills; it’s deadly to the theater.”

In 1961, while enrolled at the Yale School of Drama, Guare finished the short play The Happy Journey from 58th St. and Ninth Avenue to 59th St. and Eighth Avenue, a work inspired by Wilder’s one-act play The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden. Four years later, Guare revised the play and retitled it Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday. The stage directions call for few design elements beyond a chair or two and only a small number of props. Wilder’s influence remains strongly evident throughout, particularly his departure from the scenic realism of most American drama and, harking back to the Greeks and Elizabethans, his adoption of multiple theatrical conventions from these precursors, including the bare stage. When Agnes and Andrew move from the street to the coffee shop simply by sitting in chairs and miming the drinking of coffee, Guare is evoking the scene in Our Town when Emily and George similarly enter Mr. Mogan’s drugstore and sit at the soda fountain, represented by two stools and a board laid across two chairs.

Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday made its “off-off-Broadway” debut on October 25, 1966, at the storied Caffe Cino, part of a double bill that also featured the debut of The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year, another of Guare’s one-act plays. The venue “could hold about 45 people and was officially full when two people were seated on top of the cigarette machine,” recalls Magie Dominic, one of the actor-directors who performed there. The “stage,” such as it was, was an eight-square-foot wooden platform placed on the floor, which perfectly suited the bare sets required for Guare’s early plays. Established near the end of 1958 by Joe Cino as a coffeehouse and a place for art exhibits, “The Cino,” as it was known, began hosting poetry readings and, eventually, plays and sketches featuring gay themes by such future prominent playwrights as Tom Eyen and Lanford Wilson. By the mid-1960s, the venue attracted such new playwrights as Guare and Sam Shepard and helped launch the careers of such celebrated actors as Bernadette Peters, Harvey Keitel, and Al Pacino.

Note: The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, were reclusive hoarders who in the spring of 1947 were found dead in their Harlem townhouse.

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The action of the play is the West 59th Street block between Eighth and Ninth avenues in New York City on a pleasant April day, . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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