Metro Pulse/Backstage/Six Degrees of Separation

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What:
Six Degrees of Separation

When:
Oak Ridge Playhouse

Where:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. thru March 7. Call 482-9999 for tickets.

Cost:
$10-$15.

Six Degrees is a thoughtful take on guilt and privilege

by Paige M. Travis

In the same way you wouldn’t expect a steakhouse to offer a tasty vegetarian meal, you might not go to a theater specializing in musicals anticipating a weighty, dialogue-dense contemporary drama. Although 61 seasons of shows in the history of Oak Ridge Playhouse have included their share of seriousness, Six Degrees of Separation is a mildly surprising choice for the community theater. Or maybe I was just unnerved by the frank usage of “fuck” and portrayal of homosexuality while in a room populated mostly by people who could be my grandparents. But the opening night crowd seemed to respond well, if not uproariously, to the wit and pathos of John Guare’s play.

Nominated for the Best Play Tony Award and the Pulitizer Prize for Drama in 1991, Six Degrees is a strange mix of timeless conflicts of race, class and familial relations, and a dated portrait of a post-Reagan, pre-Clinton America. Flan and Ouisa Kittredge are a well-off couple living in a flat overlooking Central Park. They are clever and sophisticated people with good vocabularies and smart clothes, belonging to a tight social network of like-minded contemporaries. On the outside, they’re the kind of people to be envied, but when they reveal their insecurities, it becomes clear that these rich folks are no better off emotionally or morally than any less wealthy counterparts.

One night, the Kittredges are hosting their “South African friend Jeffrey” in the hopes that he will lend them $2 million to finance the purchase of a painting that Flan, a failed painter, will then resell to a Japanese or German buyer for a profit. Their evening is interrupted by the arrival of a young black man, Paul, who has been mugged and stabbed in the park. He knows of them through their children, he says, and proceeds to dazzle them with inspiring stories of his father, groundbreaking actor Sidney Poitier, and his thesis on imagination and Catcher in the Rye; he even promises them roles in his dad’s film adaptation of Cats. The couple puts Paul in their son’s shirt and offers, no, insists he stay the night. They treat him as a family member; even Jeffrey’s experience of the young man inspires him to give Flan the $2 mil. The couple experiences a cultural high, a feeling of superiority that isn’t smug—it’s just the way they are.

Why does this sane couple allow this absolute stranger to stay in their home? The answers are revealed slowly, parsed out over the next hour, in dialogue that is over-written and sometimes difficult to hear over the clatter of the actors’ shoes on the wooden flooring and the squeaking of the audience shifting in their chairs. They are fascinated by his otherness; Paul is black, and although Flan and Ouisa are politically correct (and honestly kind), they are sheltered by wealth and status. They feel guilt about their privilege. But they are also soothed by Paul’s familiarity: he knows their kids; he dresses well; he clearly has class. But they soon realize (as their fears suspect) that class is an illusion.

As Paul’s identity as a complete fraud becomes apparent, Flan and Ouisa (and their friends who were duped the night before) seek to retrieve some of their pride by trying to find the true identity of this young man. Some of the play’s humor is in watching these people try to figure out why they feel so violated when they gave of their homes, their food, their cash and their feelings of their own accord. They find out that Paul learned about the Kittredges and other families from his former lover Trent, a classmate of their children. When those children, now grown and in college at Harvard, etc., are gathered to help investigate Paul’s lineage, they treat their parents like idiots. “This is racist,” says Tess, who wants to get married and climb mountains in Afghanistan in order to hurt her parents. The reunion of parents and children brings out all the accusations the younger generation has for its elders, highlighting exactly why the 40-somethings took to Paul like Brie on a Carrs cracker: Paul treated the Kittredges with respect, not a lifetime’s worth of hostility or disappointment. “He wanted to be one of us,” Ouisa says to Flan in the play’s final minutes. “He did more for us than our children ever have. He wanted to be your child.”

Guare’s play treads a complex line between making a mockery of the Manhattan social class and sympathizing with its attempt at social consciousness. As the Kittredges, Joseph Jaynes and Karen Brunner express the couple’s desire for social status and the moral ambiguity of their actions. They are snobby, yet their fondness for Paul is believable, and, our empathy is earned.

Marquez Rhyne captures Paul’s refinement, the element that so enchants his “victims.” And his Sidney Poitier impersonation is spot-on. But it’s difficult to avoid comparing his portrayal to that of Will Smith’s in the 1993 film. Smith is charming, adorable and, in the final scenes, vulnerable in his delusion; Rhyne’s performance is most potent near the end, particularly when he and Ouisa are on the phone. She’s practically in tears trying to convince him to go to the police; he’s stopping just short of calling her Mother, begging for her help. They are the mother and son that never were, and probably never can be, but each of them—using the power of imagination and hope befitting the inspiration of Sidney Poitier—can believe for a few moments that it’s possible.