The General of Hot Desire (John Guare)

With the last few days bringing plays that are just slightly too large, lots of historical research and the need to set entire days aside, not to mention preparation for several shows, my reading got a bit backed up, and I needed a quick fifteen-minute play to jump on the tracks again.

I found it by skipping to the end of Love’s Fire, a collection of short plays based on Shakespearean sonnets, and leaving the penultimate bit for later reading. Today we’re taking a (expedited) look into John Guare’s General of Hot Desire.

I have only read one other work by Guare (but it was about a president, so I had to,) but I am to understand that he likes self-commenting on the form that theater takes, and that is evident in this play. We begin with the entire company desperately trying to understand the two Sonnets assigned to them so that they can get a hot take on it, and then turn it into something worth watching.

This is entertainingly realized by the stage being filled with books of commentary that the actors try to pull from, only to be distressed when all they keep coming up with is that the play is about the general concept of “love”. Not love for any particular person, not painful love, not tragic love, just “love” as a good force on its own, and who wants to see that on stage?

They eventually contort themselves into telling an abbreviated version of the Christian story of the universe, with the tree of knowledge being set apart as the bad guy for all time: it becomes a symbol of what keeps us from God. Knowledge keeps us from understanding, and when we try to scratch around expression of the unexpressable through means of art, we step too far and God curses us with more knowledge that we mistake for understanding.

I really do only have another moment or two to write this so it’s all I can spare to say that this is by far the most entertaining, and close to the most comprehensible, work in this collection so far. It makes perfect sense as a close to the program and I love the way that Guare merges humor with the broader tone poem he is trying to create.