THEATER REVIEW: 'Six Degrees of Separation' at Williamstown Theatre Festival

Submitted by Chris Newbound on July 21, 2010 - 11:33am
Theater

 

 
Six Degrees of Separation
Main Stage Williamstown Theatre Festival
 
By Chris Newbound
 
A Williamstown Theatre Production of Six Degrees of Separation, by John Guare, directed by Anne Kauffman
 
Quisa                                                Margaret Colin
Flan                                                   Tim Daly
Larkin                                                Tom Nelis
Paul                                                   Ato Essandoh
Dr. Fine                                              Ned Eisenberg
Kitty                                                   Candy Buckley
Geoffrey                                             John Bedford Lloyd
Detective                                            James Joseph O’Neil
Tess                                                   Clea Alsip
Doug                                                   Michael Bradley Cohen
Jen                                                     Lauren Blumenfeld
Woody                                                Dominic Spillane
Rick                                                    Lucas Kavner
Elizabeth                                             Ariel Woodiwiss
Trent                                                   Benjamin Mehl
Doorman/Policeman                             Daniel Hartley
Hustler                                                Drigan Lee                       
 
In choosing works such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Landford Wilson’s Fifth of July, and John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, now getting a first-rate production at Williamstown Theatre Festival, it could be argued that artistic director Nicky Martin’s swan-song season is less American classics and more American minor classics, works that theatergoers may have well forgotten about. If this is an American classics season then where is Arthur Miller, where is Tennessee Williams? Only Thorton Wilder’s Our Town seems to rank as a true American classic. But that being said, Six Degrees, as a minor classic, or just as one of the more engaging American plays of the late twentieth century (at least from the evidence of this production directed by Anne Kauffman) hasn’t really lost a step.
 
Classic or not, it certainly remains an interesting and lively piece of theater, in large part due to its non-sequential loose structure that employs multiple characters turning to the audience at any given moment and narrating its inventive and unpredictable story. The play, set in Manhattan sometime in the late ’80s (it premiered at Lincoln Center in 1990 and therefore this is its twentieth anniversary) opens with the well-to-do Quisa (exquisitely played by Margaret Colin) and Flan (Tim Daly) waking in the middle of the night, after seemingly having been robbed. The upper East Side apartment setting along with the silky robes the couple wears brings to mind Noel Coward, but soon enough we are transported to something far more off-beat. Earlier that same evening, the unexpected arrival of a young, well-dressed African American man launches a series of events that one can argue forever changes Quisa and Flan or changes them not at all.
           
Flan is an art dealer trying to woo his South African friend into chipping in two million dollars to help purchase a Cezanne which he can then turn around and sell to some wealthy Japanese art collectors for six million, creating a tidy, and much-needed profit. Flan, Quisa and Geoffrey (John Bedford Lloyd) are, in fact, all deciding on which restaurant to dine out at when the stranger, bleeding from having been stabbed from a mugging, or so he says, enters, claiming to being a good friend of Quisa and Flan’s children from school (“two at Harvard, one at Brown,” Flan informs proudly with an aside to the audience), as well as being the son of the famous actor Sidney Poitier.
 
So begins an elaborate con that is only later revealed to Quisa and Flan (and us, too, the audience) when, with another couple, they learn that the exact situation, more or less, has happened to their friends as well. The remainder of the play pursues just who this Paul (played with flair by Ato Essandoh) really is and what is he really after if not their expensive possessions. And just how has he been able to so convincingly fool Quisa and Flan and others into believing he is who he clearly is not. Apparently based on a real incident, the play, at times quite comically, explores the question of just who any of us really are and how all of us, to some extent or another, invent the personas that we ultimately inhabit.
 
The children soon arrive to try and help sort out the mystery as well as to provide some comic relief. As it turns out, Paul, who is gay, has seduced a former classmate of the children’s from prep school, and it is he who has served as Paul’s source of information, as well as providing Paul with lessons in diction and vocabulary, playing the part of Henry Higgins and therefore helping Paul gain entry into this rarified upper crust world, where the rich, we’re informed, also live hand to mouth, only with much larger sums of money involved.
           
On the surface, the play works well as a straight-forward mystery—we’re as interested to find out the why and how of this con as Quisa and Flan are—while at the same time it flirts with more important issues that it never quite follows through with. Watching the play, which does move swiftly at around ninety minutes with no intermission, one is almost expecting a second act, one in which Guare might go deeper into some of the ground he begins to cover only quite late in the play, particularly as it relates to Quisa and Flan’s marriage, and even more specificially Quisa’s struggle to find meaning to a life she can’t quite account for, one she wishes had a little less “randomness” to it. At moments, she seems part Nora ready to flee her doll's house, but then again, not quite courageous enough to do so. 
 
Helping Paul find himself, whoever that self may finally turn out to be, offers Quisa, at least momentarily, an opportunity to find such missing meaning, as well as create a connection that she’s somehow failed to make with her husband or her children. And yet Guare seems to shy away, in the end, from pursuing the matter much further, less Edward Albee and maybe more Noel Coward, after all.
           
As Quisa and Flan’s life seems to have returned to normal by play’s end, Paul having disappeared as abruptly as he arrived, perhaps having gone to jail, perhaps having killed himself there, or perhaps simply moving on to other hustles—the couple off to another auction—one is left to fill in the ending, projecting our own happy or unhappy ending on Quisa and Flan’s future life, as uncertain of who they really are as we are of Paul. [July 20, 2010.]
 
Sets, Antje Ellerman; costumes, Jennifer Moeller; lighting, David Weiner; sound, Fitz Patton; production stage manager, David Sugarman; assistant stage manager, Amber Wedin. Runs through July 25. Running time: 90 minutes
 
[Photos of Tim Daly and Margaret Colin by T. Charles Erickson courtesy WTF] 
 
 
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