Six Degrees of Separation Books

I was introduced to this play about a month ago when I was cast in the role of Kitty, a friend of the Kitteredges. Intending to only skim the script and hilight my lines, I read the entire play in one sitting. From the opening scene to the closing, I felt like I was being included in the characters' experiences.
The characters' personalities are also quite deep. After the first couple of times that I read through the script, I realized that there was so much more to the characters than what was written on the page. Guare does a wonderful job of letting the reader use his imagination and create his own backgrounds and deeper personalities for the characters.
This play is an intellectual-artsy type for those who are willing to examine their trust for strangers.

Even if this play were worthless, which it is not quite, the concept that gives it its title has passed into the American lexicon, so it will long be remembered, if in name only. Supposedly based on true events, it tells the story of a New York City couple, Flanders (Flan) and Louisa (Ouisa) Kittredge, unsuccessful private art dealers who are desperately clinging to their Manhattan socialite lifestyle. Flan is cash strapped and badly needs to turn up some money to complete a two million dollar deal. One night, as they are hitting up a South African acquaintance for some money, a young black man, Paul, turns up on their doorstep. He claims to be a Harvard classmate of their kids who has just been mugged in Central Park. Any initial resistance they may feel towards this stranger evaporates when he cooks them and their guest dinner, expounds on Catcher in the Rye, reveals that his father is Sidney Poitier, and intimates that he might be able to get them all jobs as extras in his Dad's movie version of Cats. He plays their liberal guilt and their social climbing hunger to perfection and makes such an impression on the South African that he agrees to invest with Flan on the art deal. The grateful couple allow Paul to stay overnight in their apartment while they go out.

His implausible story begins to unravel though when, returning early to their apartment, they find him in bed with a male street hustler and throw them both out. Flan takes particular relish in telling the story of their visitor and they are surprised to find that Paul has similarly hustled a number of their friends. They, especially Ouisa, become obsessed with finding out who Paul really is; apparently just a street hustler. He drops back into their lives several times, and they are tangentially involved in a scandal when Paul seduces and dumps a young man who then commits suicide.

Most of the philosophizing in the play, with the exception of the Six Degrees concept, is fairly silly and the people are immensely annoying. There are some funny lines, but most of the humor comes from watching the loathsome Kittredges humiliate themselves repeatedly. It is perhaps the ultimate comment on the kind of people that the play portrays that none of it is very believable. Despite the nonfiction origins, it strains credulity to believe that people who are this shallow actually exist. I'd recommend it mildly, but only for its cruel treatment of a group of people I don't much like--upper class NY City liberals. The LA Theatre Works production has the added bonus that Flan is played by Alan Alda in a near self caricature.

GRADE : C

John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation" is about the foibles of a New York City couple named Flanders and Louisa Kittredge, who go by the nicknames Flan and Ouisa. They are a pretentious pair desperate to make a deal with a wealthy South African to keep them in their swank lifestyle when a black man named Paul barges into their lives and cons his way into an invitation to stay the night. Because Paul is charming and intellectual -- flattering Flan and Ouisa to their heart's content -- they become easy dupes, totally shocked when they wake in the morning to find that Paul had invited a male hustler into his bed while they slept. There are touches of liberal guilt in how easily Flan and Ouisa are deceived in that they are fairly patronizing to Paul as a young black man who has (seemingly) been mugged and left penniless until his father gets into town the next morning. But the truth is that the Kittredges are not taken in by their guilt but by the promise that they can get something out of their association with Paul. He claims that the father he is waiting for is none other than Sidney Poitier, coming to NYC to cast for his upcoming film adaptation of "Cats" -- and that he can get them roles as extras to repay their kindness. That is Paul's modus operandi (it turns out that he has also conned several of Ouisa and Flan's friends in the same fashion). He promises his marks a connection to a higher level of society that they aspire to. For Ouisa, Flan et al this means the world of celebrity, but for Rick and Elizabeth (the poor couple Paul turns to when his mugged-son-of-Poitier shtick won't work anymore) it is access to the upper east side world that the Kittredges inhabit. Eventually Paul's relentless conning has tragic consequences, and it feels typical of this play's mindset that the tragedy happens to the lower-class characters while the upper-crust ones hover above it all. But the main fault of Guare's play is that the characters are so uniformly unappealing. They are all pretentious (a word that just about sums up the play) and unlikable cartoons lacking in depth or realism. The parents abysmally ignore their college-aged children, who lavishly act out in retaliation, and they all just feel like stereotypes instead of relatable people you might actually meet in the real world. This is not to say that the play is without merit. It's now famous concept that everyone in the world is connected by a mere six people is intriguing, as are its questions regarding race and class distinctions. The question of how far a person is willing to go to break into the upper echelons of society is also a good one. But what I found most intriguing was when Ouisa, wondering why Paul went to such great lengths to gain access to their lives, commented that "We're not enough to be envied." Can anyone ever be happy with what they have when someone else will always have more? All in all I found "Six Degrees of Separation" to be a mixed bag with some good points muddled by weak characters.

My thanks to Mr. Guare. Had he not portrayed the rich as fatuous dupes, I might still envy them.

Based on the true story of a wealthy, well-meaning liberal couple in the upper echelons of New York society's upper crust, we have Flan or Flanders Kittredge and his wife Ouisa or Louisa; the former is a standoffish but deep down good-hearted art dealer in the private sector who has a penchant for the works of Kandinsky and Cezanne; the latter is his wife, articulate and intelligent who is in need of something of greater meaning and depth other than money, art, fancy restaurants and wealthy friends.

And so the evening commences with a friend from South Africa; they are discussing poverty, the downtrodden and the oppressed, overblown intellectual banter to elevate the ego and make the evening progress smoothly and divinely. But the night is anything but that, for it is dramatically interrupted by Paul - a young black homosexual flimflammer or Peter Funk man with a penchant for male street hustlers (only when he is happy - his words). He comes into the lives of these two unwitting victims after stabbing and passing himself off as a friend to their children who are at Harvard. And what else does her profess? You guessed it - that he is the son of you-know-who: Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier, the most eminent black actor of his generation, the hero that has been the catalyst for the lives of these socially and politically 'aware' forty-somethings.

Paul charms and bedazzles himself into the lives of those he encounters, using his wit, knowledge, ease and most importantly, his race, more specifically, Sidney Poitier's name. As the play intensifies, Paul promises the Kittredge's and future unsuspecting victims minor roles in the movie version of Cats, for which his 'father' is purportedly directing. The victims salivate over the prospect of being in a Poitier film, and they let their guards down, for their humdrum existence now has that depth and meaning that was missing at the beginning of the play; it has that structure that their kids, their careers, their money and their friends could not provide. It has a purpose. An assumed black actor's son is mugged in Central Park. And the kind Kittredges help him out. When life is not all that we want it to be, it is easy to have the wool pulled over our eyes. We believe because we want to believe. That is the meat of this play.

This play is complex because of the issues that are addressed; it is not just about race and economics, but it is about the purpose of existance in life. This work evolves and reveals so many layers, layers that are eventually reached, and thus, a truer gift of insight gained. Ironically, in the environment of the wealthy elite and the established intelligentsia, it was a sharpie who made this couple and others similar to them see the gift that life and living really is.