Six Degrees of Separation
Playwright John Guare is having veritable West Coast festival of revivals of plays from the eighties and nineties, what with the fall opening of House of Blue Leaves at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and now Six Degrees of Separation in San Diego. You may well ask: what is it that makes Guare’s plays resonate some twenty or thirty years after their premieres? It seems that he is proving to be a very personal yet perceptive chronicler of a generation whose insights about the eternal and unchanging human condition.
Six Degrees contrasts the “upstairs” of New York intelligentsia with the “downstairs” hoi polloi right outside their door. Based on a true event, Guare’s play introduces the comfortable and witty couple, Flan (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Ouisa (Karen Ziemba), to Paul (Samuel Stricklen), a young man who claims to be Sidney Poitier’s son. Paul invades their upper West Side home with a slight wound, declaring that he has been mugged. He weaves what seems to be a plausible story that he knew the couple’s children in school, and just happened to remember that they lived nearby. The pair has been entertaining Geoffrey (Tony Torn) whom they hope will fund the purchase of an expensive Cezanne painting in order to turn it over for profit. Paul proves his worth, assembling a four-course meal from scraps in the kitchen and charming the three with a detailed discussion of “Catcher in the Rye.” After the couple invites him to stay the night, they discover Paul caught in the act with a homeless person in the early morning hours.
Thus ends any similarity to the actual incident. Guare’s playmaking expands and lifts the anecdote to examine how such a person could con his way into the isolated inner sanctum of upper-class life. He has deepened Paul’s culpability so that he can reveal gullibility of people who smugly believe they are above such machinations. He utilizes a fast-moving style of direct address that criss-crosses past and future with dramatizations of key events. The result is distinctly cinematic, with scenes sliding effortlessly one to another.
New York director Trip Cullman helps an appreciation of eighties sensibilities with no-nonsense staging, enabling the predominately New York based actors to strut their stuff. Karen Ziemba is fine as the mother love-starved Ouisa, who cannot shake her fascination with Paul. Her driving need serves not so subtly to indict the east coast art world as empty and vapid. Though all are uniformly excellent actors, Catherine Good as Elizabeth and Andrew Dahl as Trent are significant young actors.
Andromache Chalfant’s excellent set design abets the writing, opening up the photo-realistic box set to the grungy street with ingenuity. Her set subtly makes a further comment on the art from two layers of society: the uptown living room sports reproductions of iconic paintings including “a Kandinsky painted on two sides” while the street scaffolding is overloaded with graffiti. The costumes, conceived by Emily Rebholz are appropriate to the period. That magnificent red dress is especially “wowzah”! But the entre-acte music from Paul Peterson is a little too on-the-button.
Six Degrees of Separation continues Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays at 7:00 PM, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 PM, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:00 PM through February 15th, 2009, at The Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, and Balboa Park in San Diego 92112. Tickets: from $29.00 to $66.00. Phone (619) 23-GLOBE.
For more information, go online at www.theoldglobe.org.