There’s merciless comedy here, skewering rich, liberal New Yorkers - their insularity, their susceptibility to flattery and the chance of a brush with fame, their hunger to fill the void of their spoiled children’s withheld affections. Fine (Ned Eisenberg), also falls for Paul’s scam, the police get involved, and the source of Paul’s access to them all is traced.
The entanglements multiply when it’s revealed that the Kittredges‘ friends, Kitty (Lisa Emery) and Larkin (Michael Countryman), had a similar visit, all of them somewhat deflated to learn they don’t have exclusivity on the anecdote. That gives the playwright a figure of unknown identity and origin through which to investigate the theory Ouisa has recently read, maintaining that every person on the planet is separated by just six other people. Guare lifted his inspiration from a 1983 newspaper account of a con man who talked his way into moneyed Upper East Side homes via methods similar to Paul’s. The panic of that discovery is played as hilarious knockabout farce, leaving Ouisa and Flan breathless at the violation of it all, and Paul supposedly mortified as he’s shown the door. But after they put him up for the night, they’re horrified to find him the next morning intimately connected to a male hustler (James Cusati-Moyer), who’s not the least bit shy. And even if it later emerges that Ouisa once described Cats as “an all-time low in a lifetime of theatergoing,” she and Flan get positively giddy at the prospect of being extras in the film.īefore long, Paul is cooking them dinner, dazzling them with his eloquence on the cultural relevance of The Catcher in the Rye and helping to seal the $2 million deal. Besides, Paul seems charming, articulate and sincere, and Ouisa and Flan are so beyond thrilled to hear that their children have apparently said nice things about them, they hang on the stranger’s every word. This is 1990, pre-cellphones and internet, so that story more or less holds water. Other salient details surfaced, notably that Paul’s father, Sidney Poitier, was flying in on the Red Eye that night and was about to direct a screen adaptation of - wait for it - Cats. Claiming to be a friend of their children from Harvard, Paul revealed he’d been robbed of all his cash and cards and didn’t know where else to go. The doorman showed up a young man named Paul (Hawkins) who had sustained a knife wound in a mugging in Central Park. It begins with Ouisa and Flan rushing on stage the morning after, in elegant bathrobes and high agitation, surveying the chaos, assessing any possible damage or loss, and then recounting what happened directly to the audience. The Kittredges are practically salivating at the prospect, cooing the words “two million dollars” like an aphrodisiacal mantra.Īctually, that’s not really how the play starts. The object of the evening is to hit up their guest for a $2 million stake in a Cezanne that’s come on the market, which Flan will then resell to Japanese investors, netting them all a tidy profit.
Ouisa and her art dealer husband Flan (John Benjamin Hickey) are entertaining wealthy South African friend Geoffrey (Michael Siberry) in their roomy Fifth Avenue apartment - designed by Mark Wendland in chic austerity, with a pointedly referenced double-sided Kandinsky in prominent view before a deep burgundy scrim with glimmering signs of further opulence beyond. A 1990 hit that spawned a Kevin Bacon party game and a catchall cultural tag for interconnectedness, it remains a work of stinging satirical brilliance, creeping poignancy and teasing ambiguity that challenges us to think about how willing we are to allow authentic experience to pierce our surfaces. That heat is due in part to Cullman’s whiplash pacing, with actors literally bolting onto the stage hollering their entrance lines, and scenes that fold together with the dizzying dexterity of an ace card shark shuffling the deck. While those two sensational performances occupy the play’s molten center, the entire large ensemble that surrounds them is on fire. The thoroughbred Allison Janney stars as Ouisa Kittredge, a well-heeled Manhattan WASP who dreams in dollar signs until a beguiling young African-American trickster, imbued with both obfuscation and naked yearning by Corey Hawkins, exposes her to the spiritual emptiness beneath her complacent sophistication.
The 2011 Broadway revival of The House of Blue Leaves was too unbalanced to do the job, but Trip Cullman’s razor-sharp staging of Six Degrees of Separation serves as a welcome reminder of the fiercely intelligent, pungently funny voice of playwright John Guare at his vintage best.
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