THE STORY: In the Holy Year of 2000 in Rome, Matt has learned that his painting has given him a curable form of cancer. In return for survival, he must abandon paint for a new artistic medium. Ultimately he chooses to dress in religious garb, videotape pilgrims’ intimate confessions and display the confessions as exhibits. Along the way, “Father Matt” gets more than he bargained for with Ron and Dolo, the parents of his friend Pete, and his videotaping ends up entangling and destroying their lives. A scathingly funny satire on the warping hunger for fame, the moral pollution and desperation in the worship of icons, both religious and secular, and the betrayal involved in creating art, CHAUCER IN ROME brims with John Guare’s inimitable wit and understanding.
“Mr. Guare has written exquisite monologues…whose very cadences seem shaped by shame. The details are vintage Guare…The sense of the grotesqueness in the everyday is dead-on…” —The New York Times.
“…Guare is a wise and funny master of the ironies of fate and place…” —New York Post.
“CHAUCER IN ROME has all of Guare’s hallmarks—the goofy detours into absurdism, the deeply black humor, lengthy discussions offering at once bizarre and profound views generously spiced with aphorisms…” —CurtainUp.
