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The play's success was helped by the fact that Guare didn't let style obliterate substance. However, what set Guare's play apart from literary send-ups of that era, like Tom Wolfe's 1987 best selling novel Bonfire of the Vanities, was his clever use of the real hoax to explore that statistical theory about our being linked to anybody, anywhere through a chain of just six people.
#6 degrees of separation play movie
opened it could also be seen as a turned-on-its-head parody of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the movie starring Sidney Poitier as a young doctor's first meeting with his white future in-laws. Yet, this theatrical salad tossed together with assorted social issues and attitudes remains a tasty send-up of people obsessed with the pursuit of money, infatuated with celebrity, and more attuned to a needy stranger than their own children.Īt the time Six Degrees. Guare's funny but ultimately sad psychodrama, its stylish structure and multi-faceted script peppered with trendy cultural references, made it a defining dramatic slice of New York life during a particular era. Ouisa's connection to Paul actually leaves her more introspective with a painful sense of helplessness about connecting her world and Paul's - not to mention a probable unhealable wound to her marriage.
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The only exception is Ouisa Kitteredge (that dropped "L" Guare's sly nod to the Kittredge For Hampton's marks the damage was mainly to their egos. No doubt David Hampton's most famous scheme (he continued his con games until his death in 2013) has been outdone by the likes of Bernard Madoff, whose many victims suffered devastating financial losses- and most recently by a real estate billionaire and reality show host who conned workers into electing him by promising to bring back well-paying jobs that are as systemically obsolete as the horse and buggy. He also claimed to be the son of film star Sidney Poitier and the victim of muggers who had stolen his money and Harvard term paper (slyly titled "Injustices in the Criminal Justice System"). Using his typical funny to sad juggling style he cleverly dramatized the empty values of the Reagan era's one-percenters who were suckered into believing that Paul was a student, at Harvard and knew their children. Guare did invent was his own group of upper crust New Yorkers and a real Hampton counterpart named Paul. His inspiration was a real life con man named David Hampton. Guare also didn't invent the the idea that a young black outsider could insinuate himself into the lives of well-heeled, well-known New Yorkers by laying claim to several of those possible 6-degree connections. But it was his 1990 play and subsequent movie that made its title, Six Degrees of Separation, part of our daily vocabulary.
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John Guare didn't invent that theory about there being only six degrees of separation between us and everyone else. Six Degrees of Separation is one of those rare works that capture both the supercharged pulse of our present era and the deepest and most mysterious movements of the human heart.Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins (photo: Joan Marcus) "In this soaring and deeply provacative tragicomedy of race, class, and manners, John Guare has created the msot important American play in years. Guare uses the props of the late twentieth century, such as social issues and art, to create a comprehensive picture of a fragmented society, one in which those simple six degrees that bind people together are overlooked, blatantly ignored, and, very occasionally, celebrated Guare based the premise of his play on an actual incident-a young African-American man gained access to the homes of upper-class New Yorkers by pretending to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier-but the creation of the play is an imaginative tour de force. Xiii, 120 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates : 21 cmĬalled a tragicomedy by some critics, Six Degrees of Separation is a witty, biting, yet ultimately sincere commentary on what drives people: the desire for money, fame, social standing, comfort, and, for the lucky, a desire for meaningful human connection.