John Guare (rhymes with "air"; born February 5, 1938) is an Irish American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate. He stated in a Paris Review interview that he grew up in an Irish Catholic family.