SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION ANALYSIS MOVIE
The play is based on the true story of David Hampton, who in the early 1980s posed as the son of the movie star Sidney Poitier to dupe some well-connected Manhattan residents to give him money and invite him as a guest into their homes. On the most practical level, the play is dated because the specific scam is far less likely to happen in the age of Google. Even the most privileged amongst theatergoers are no longer necessarily drawn to a world on stage that takes privilege as a given - everybody’s assumed point of view - even if that privilege is subtly mocked. The new production, still set in the 1980s, feels dated, and not just because of some now-obscure 1980s references. The play was also given the 1991 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. It achieved a place in our culture for having popularized the concept of its title – that each human being on earth can be connected to every other human being through a relationship chain of six or fewer steps. This judgment contrasts with the acclaim that Six Degrees of Separation received when it was first produced. And, while the play touches on such matters as race and class and the struggle for connection in modern life, it does not offer the profound insights that the playwright evidently intends. But it does not add up to the significant experience that Allison Janney’s character feels. It is funny – sometimes very funny - well crafted, coated with a patina of sparkling sophistication, even at times pointed and almost poignant.
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Corey Hawkins, Allison Janney, John Benjamin Hickey in Six Degrees of Separation (Photo: Joan Marcus)Īll production photos at Near the end of Six Degrees of Separation, Allison Janney, portraying the first rich white victim of a young black con man, tells her husband that she doesn’t want to turn the experience into an anecdote, “with no teeth and a punch line you’ll mouth over and over for years to come.” But it was an anecdote that John Guare heard from friends, reportedly at a dinner party, that inspired him to write Six Degrees of Separation in the first place, and his 1990 play, now being revived on Broadway for the first time, in fact feels like the theatrical equivalent of a dinner party anecdote.