John Guare first heard of David Hampton in 1983. At the time Guare was a playwright best known for his award-winning play "House of Blue Leaves," and David Hampton was a young con man best known for passing himself off to Manhattan elite as the son of Sydney Poitier in order to burglarize them.
Guare learned of Hampton's scams through Osborne Elliot, the dean of Columbia's graduate school of journalism and a close friend of Guare's, and thus Guare's award winning play "Six Degrees of Separation" was born.
This weekend, "Six Degrees of Separation," based on Hampton's exploits, comes to Theatre Intime under the direction of Noah Burger '04.
The show features Khalil Sullivan '04 as Paul, the suave con man, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins '06 as Geoffrey the South African millionaire and Ted Hall '05 and Bibiane Choi '03 as the duped couple, Flan and Ouisa Kittredge.
Paul charms the Kittredges by pretending to know their children at Harvard and by promising them roles in his father's production of "Cats."
The Kittredges open their home up to Paul only to find him in bed with another man later that evening. When the couple learns that he has also fooled many of their friends, they begin to question their own lives and priorities.
Drawing on a cast and crew of talented undergraduates, Burger brings the audience into a world of wealth and pretension but also into a world where the characters are consumed by a confused, tragic-comic search for identity.
This search ultimately forces the characters to deal with some of the most pressing issues of the 1990s, ranging from homophobia to the AIDS epidemic to the pretensions and trials of upper-class living.
"For its time, 'Six Degrees' was a very politically and socially conscious play," said Burger in an email. "It contrasts between the characters' witty words and their life experiences with the things they discuss, or in some cases don't discuss."
"From their apartments on the upper east side of New York, characters chat safely of apartheid South Africa and race relations, only to later have those same issues burst into their own lives in a very immediate way," he said.
Burger also noted that the issue of homosexuality and the AIDS epidemic in America was "all over the news at the time of the play's first run," yet the play's wealthy characters never discuss it until they are confronted with a homosexual man and "are suddenly forced by reality into awareness."
The play revolves around snappy, fast paced dialogue that seems to drive the play forward even more than the actual plot. The characters also break the "fourth wall" of the stage by directly addressing the audience, a technique that pulls the audience further into the world and the minds of the Manhattan elite.
In fact, Paul is never directly presented to the audience at all. Instead, he is portrayed through the eyes of Ouisa and Flan who narrate the story to the audience.
In a world of masks and confusion, "Six Degrees of Separation" also addresses the issue of redefining an American dream obscured by the forces of wealth and high society.
"What's the use of money and a nice house and a great education if your marriage sucks, your kids hate you and you're more willing to accept a stranger into your heart than your own family?" Sullivan said in an email.
"There's a need to redefine the American dream. We're still losing sight of something here, something more precious than all the gold in Fort Knox."
Paul ultimately becomes a symbol for redefining this dream as he attempts to recreate himself throughout the play.
"I hesitate to call what Paul does a scam," Hall said. "Ouisa characterizes it near the end of the play. Paul is an explorer, looking to conquer the new world. That new world is upper-middle-class New York."
The set, designed by Angela Buckingham 'GS is sparse and resembles a Victorian parlor while also reflecting the abstract style of painter Wassily Kandinsky.
A double-sided Kandinsky painting hangs in the middle of the set and rotates between an ordered and a chaotic painting, reflecting the theme of duality that recurs throughout the play.
In the end "Six Degrees of Separation" is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but instead a passionately inquisitive play that combines humor and pathos in an attempt to analyze contemporary American society.
"The play jostles you around, but you never lose hope for its characters," Burger said. "'Six Degrees,' most essentially, is about the imagination, and its power as a catalyst for change. Paul transforms himself from pauper to prince virtually through ingenuity and will."
"The play's message — that change is possible, and that the imagination makes it so — is a hopeful one. No matter how bad it gets for any of these characters, their imagination will always be there to help them sort things out."
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