Somewhere toward the middle of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” Stockard Channing, playing Ouisa Kittredge, the central character, makes a speech that purports to explain the meaning of the title. Miss Channing is alone onstage; the lights have dimmed, and she has taken up a position on the arm of a sofa. Throughout the speech, she gazes out at undefined spaces in the theater, and she talks with the lost look and ever-changing face of a born storyteller. The moment has a feeling of wind-down: you might think the play was about to end. Miss Channing, moreover, is so compelling in her impersonation of someone trying to impose meaning on an experience that you just might believe her. You just might be suckered into thinking that what she says about “six degrees of separation” was all there was to it.
Offhand, I can think of no higher praise for a play than to say it makes you proud of living in an imperfect world. “Six Degrees of Separation, which opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on June 14 in a staging by the incomparable Jerry Zaks, is many things: satire, social commentary, comedy of manners, family drama, literary criticism, and academic parody. It also has moments of being like a mystery thriller, an inquiry into an apparent villainy; actually it’s an inquiry into an act of innocence, but it offers a solution to the mystery of liberal guilt.
As everyone knows by now, “Six Degrees of Separation” is based on a real-life incident that was reported in the Times—an elaborate hoax practiced by a young black man on a number of East Side New Yorkers. The story was pretty funny, almost as funny as Guare’s play. What I found astonishing, going back to the news article, was how little Guare had to invent. The names were changed, of course, to protect the innocent (I use the word in its broadest sense and with some irony, for these were hardly unworldly people), but ludicrous details one might have attributed to Guare’s imagination sprang from a germ of truth: the element of homosexuality, the importance of a Broadway musical, and, most peculiar of all, the fact that the young man, whom Guare christens Paul, presented himself as the son of a famous black actor. All the same, what amazed me most was how out of this story—apparently about celebrity and Good Samaritanism—Guare had fashioned a play about money, race, class, politics, art, collective conscience, and individual psyche. First of all, he changed the profession of the principal dupe, Ouisa’s husband, Flan (John Cunningham), making him an art dealer; he changed the particular Broadway musical concerned; he changed the subject of the term paper that the conman, Paul (James McDaniel), claims to have lost; he invented a Jewish financier from South Africa (Sam Stoneberger); and he invented a painting, a double-sided Kandinsky, which hangs above the stage.
The South African financier is there partly to introduce the themes of money and politics, but everything in Guare’s play is there for several different reasons, connected to several different things. Guare spins a web of familiar cultural references that are there sometimes to be commented on, sometimes to be attitudinized about, and sometimes to help create the world that Paul wants to break in upon. What we get as an explanation for liberal guilt is something about the way a certain part of society is searching for its lost children: the idea that, as one character tells another, in the collage of seemingly unconnected ideas and objects we furnish our lives with, our children are the only thing we genuinely have to acknowledge as our own, and they prove unsatisfactory. Days after seeing the play, you realize that what Stockard Channing says about “six degrees of separation” makes no sense—it’s wishful thinking. The title of the play isn’t a reference to connections between people but to connections between things.
One of the characters keeps reminding us that every story has two sides. Whether or not we ever hear the other side of this one remains a question. As Stockard Channing points out, we never really find out who Paul was. Guare’s version of Paul’s point of view is just that—Guare’s version, a product of his imagination. And though the play suggests why a young man with a great deal going for him—a young man who could clearly make something of himself—would spend so much time and effort fashioning false images of himself, Paul’s actual motivation is something we’re left to guess at. Guare is more interested in the question of how people like Ouisa and Flan could be preyed upon. Paul gets into their home and wins their confidence not by appearing to be in distress but by telling them that their children spoke well of them.
The impulse toward storytelling can reveal an interest in truth or in fiction. Guare’s fascination with the story of this hoax came from the fact that, in spite of being unbelievable, it was true. His play is about a women whose fascination with a story that turned out not to be true derives from having believed it. Ultimately, though, Paul fascinates us because he makes us feel that the truth doesn’t actually matter. That he does this so effectively is a result of good writing and also of good acting, particularly by Mr. McDaniel and Miss Channing. Miss Channing has such a commanding range of contemporary nuance that although Mr. Zaks works his magic here with an ensemble of seventeen, there are times when Guare’s play almost seems like a vehicle for her—during the title speech, for example, or when, laughing meaninglessly at the end of a line, she looks at the audience for corroboration or in reproof. At other times, the play becomes a showcase for Mr. McDaniel, whose Paul changes so eerily from scene to scene that it’s possible to think that Guare has created a character who is totally inconsistent, and, of course, he has. In a sense, there’s no connection between any of the pictures we get of Paul. They’re like a series of portraits of young men with nothing in common but their race, which was the single certain fact about “Paul” that Guare started out with.
Tony Walton’s set for “Six Degrees” is full of empty window frames and door frames that become picture frames when characters step into them and begin to speak. It’s one of the many ways in which the play links the themes of art and storytelling. Another is the use of color, which comes to stand for so many things: race, of course, and art (the bursts of color on the double-sided Kandinsky that is the only thing we see when the lights go down between scenes); truth in narrative (the burst of color in a grim anecdote that may or may not tell us the end of Paul’s story); and theater, too. Guare’s “point,” in the end, to the extent that he has one, is something about vibrancy—the bursts of color that one longs to see, when, trying to look back on one’s life, one finds oneself telling stories. “How do we keep what happened to us without turning it into an anecdote?” Ouisa asks. A particularly inane anecdote connects the idea of storytelling with the play’s inquiry into what it means to be human. There’s also an idea of “accountability” both in the moral sense (wondering for whom or what one is responsible) and in the sense of giving an account of something. “I’m a gambler,” Flan says, and the statement seems to sum up his life. But the key to Ouisa lies in the play’s closing image and the expression in Miss Channing’s eyes as she stops beneath that ever-turning canvas, in Paul Gallo’s slow fade, and looks back at the audience one last time.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 25, 1990