John Guare: Six Degrees of Separation

Photo: Maryellenmark.com

Irish-American playwright John Guare was Born in New York in 1938. While Guare was a boy, his father suffered a heart attack and the family moved to Ellenville. Fearful that the school system there held practices that contradicted Catholic teachings and bore a hint of communism, young Guare was taken out of school by his father and consequently schooled at home. Having only 'intermittent' examinations, the boy was free to attend the movies during his childhood, and there he developed an interest in drama (1). He began writing plays at age eleven (2). Most of his early creations, To Wally Pantoni and We Leave a Credenza, for instance, were one-act comedies that demonstrated the playwright's 'flair for the absurd' (1). 

Early on in his career, Guare collaborated with Mel Shapiro and Galt McDermott, on an adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona" which eventually earned a Tony Award for best musical. He produced a series of plays called "The Nantucket Series" that featured a group of 19th century Americans in search of a utopian society. Exasperated with what were referred to as "kitchen sink" realism--dramas that were 'so real that they included the kitchen sink,' Guare sought dramatic expression that contained more fantastic elements and demonstrated "inner truth" as opposed to "surface reality" (2). Many of Guare's works concern human relationships that are tinged with pathos and humor. Six Degrees of Separation is considered a Comedy of Manners that pokes gentle humor at the customs and culture of the New York socialites it presents, demonstrating their foibles writ large, but with a resulting message concerning universal human failings and redemption. 

Six Degrees of Separation focuses, in part, on the subtle and playful critique of New York upper class society's seeming lack of depth, pretentious manners and manner of speech, values, and relationships. The play introduces art dealer Flan Kittredge and his wife, Ouisa (Louisa), who are seduced wholly into the lies of a young African American con artist, Paul, who appears one night at the door of their high-rise apartment, bleeding and complaining of having been mugged. He later cunningly convinces them that he a friend of their son at Harvard--and furthermore that he is the son of famous actor, Sidney Poitier. When the Kittredge's catch Paul in a compromising situation in their home, a complex plot of interrelated lives and discoveries unravels.

Like many of the works we have discussed this summer, Six Degrees of Separation invites discussion of multiple themes, including those of human relationships, appearances, considerations of truth and deception--what is real and what isn't, race, gender, sexuality, class, elitism, and the imagination.

Other plays by John Guare:
House of Blue Leaves 
Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
Six Degrees of Separation
Landscape of the Body

His work has received multiple Obie, Drama Critics Circle, Tony, and Olivier Best Play Awards.