Search results
Six Degrees of Separation. (play) Six Degrees of Separation is a play written by American playwright John Guare that premiered in 1990. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. [1] The play explores the existential premise that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in the world by a ...
- John Guare
- 1990
Six Degrees of Separation stunningly demonstrates the way each person’s individual vision of the world, limited by our desire to control how we ourselves are seen, leaves us prey to the manipulations and nuance of human design at play all around us. With split-second transitions narrated anecdotally by the characters that piece together a whirlwind of vignettes, John Guare’s work takes the ...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
John Guare was born on February 5, 1938, in New York. At age eleven, along with another boy, he produced his first play in a garage for an audience of family and friends. He also called up several magazines and newspapers to promote the play. Newsdaysent a photographer, and the paper ran pictures of the production in July 1949. As a teenager, Guare...
The play opens with a middle-aged, upper-class New York couple—Ouisa and Flan Kittredge—eager to share what happened the previous night. Flan and Ouisa invited a wealthy friend, Geoffrey, for dinner. Flan, an art dealer, planned to ask Geoffrey for two million dollars that he needed to purchase a Cezanne. In the midst of their drinks, there is a kn...
Trent Conway
Trent Conway attended the same high school as the Kittredge children. While attending MIT, he met Paul in Boston. The two young men had a three-month affair. Trent told Paul all about the wealthy New York families he knew.
Elizabeth
Elizabeth moved to New York from Utah with her boyfriend Rick. They want to become actors. They befriend Paul in the park and believe his story about being Flan’s ostracized son. When Paul asks them for money, Elizabeth refuses but later learns of Rick’s deceit. After Rick kills himself, Elizabeth presses charges of theft against Paul. She believes that he has taken everything from her.
Flan
SeeFlanders Kittredge
Race and Racism
Paul is the only African-American character in the play. He recognizes that his race is a detriment in the society in which he wants to immerse himself, so he makes the best of it by claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son. Paul draws on the appeal of one of the first African-American actors who successfully challenged the race barrier, much as he is attempting to do now. Paul makes pretensions to that world. He tells the Kittredges “I never knew I was black in that racist way til I was sixteen a...
Family
Paul’s primary motivation in tricking the Kittredges and their acquaintances is to win their “everlasting friendship.” Most important to Paul is creating a family for himself. Although his claim that Sidney Poitier is his father is calculated to win the trust of the liberal, wealthy Manhattanites, the lie also plays into Paul’s sublimated desire for a family. Similarly, when he claims to be Flan’s neglected son, his yearning to forge a relationship with his father is quite real. Paul’s fantas...
Imagination
Imagination is an important theme in the play. Paul has an active and vivid imagination. For one thing, it allows him to assume easily and convincingly the role of an upper-class young man. He uses his imaginative talents to persuade others to trust him and like him. With Rick and Elizabeth, Paul spins a story of being forsaken by his father, and the couple feels so badly for him that they invite him to stay with them. In a sense, they become a surrogate family, standing in for the Kittredge...
Symbolism
The play’s primary symbol is the Kandinsky painting that hangs in the Kittredges’ living room. It is the audience’s focal point; as the play opens, “A painting revolves slowly high over the stage. .. . [Kandinsky] has painted on either side of the canvas in two different styles. One side is geometric and somber. The other side is wild and vivid. The painting stops its revolve and opts for the geometric side.” The two-sided painting symbolizes human duality. Paul is the living embodiment of th...
Setting
The setting of the play is the Kittredges’ living room in their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. The Kittredges’ home and their friends reflect their social milieu. They have money, breeding, culture, and education. They send their children to East Coast boarding schools, like Groton, and private universities, like Harvard. Their material and cultural wealth is emphasized by the Kandinsky painting that hangs in their living room. Paul does not belong in this setting, though he tries to en...
Structure
The play has a nontraditional, fluid structure. The play is not divided into acts or scenes—one segment of the play flows into the next. For instance, the play opens with Ouisa and Flan relating the previous evening’s events to the audience, but quickly moves into a re-creation of the evening, complete with all the relevant players upon the stage. The characters’ words provide the aural bridge that links various segments and times. The characters also appear on stage when the narrative calls...
The Reagan Years
Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States throughout most of the 1980s, from 1981 to 1989. Reagan was a conservative Republican. He believed in the theory of supply-side economic, which argued that lowering the top income taxrates would cause people to invest their savings, thus spurring economic growth overall. Under Reagan, Congress passed a plan to cut federal income taxes by 25 percent. Congress also supported Reagan in decreasing government involvement. His economic plan calle...
Racial Issues
As in the decades before it, racial tensions continued to be a concern in the 1980s and 1990s. Several incidents became headline incidents around the country. In 1984, a white man, Bernhard Goetz shot four African-Americans youths on a New York subway. He claimed that they were trying to rob him, but he was still put on trial for attempted murder. In 1987, he was acquitted of these charges. Civil rights leaders expressed their opinion that ifthe youths had not been African American, the trial...
Americans and Apartheid
Many Americans also protested civil rights violations abroad, particularly South Africa’s apartheid system. Over the decade, these racist policies began to attract increasing attention from foreigners as well as foreign governments. In 1985, a dozen Western nations, including the United States, voted to impose economic and cultural sanctions against South Africa’s government. Measures included the prohibition of most loans to the government as well as the sale of computer and nuclear technolo...
Six Degrees of Separation opened in New York City in 1990 and was an immediate critical and popularsuccess. Outstanding reviews and full houses greatly extended the play’s original ten-week run. Eva Resnikova, writing in the National Review, called it “the lone original American play of the season.” Guare’s play went on to win the New York Critic C...
Rena Korb
Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the significance of the play’s cultural, social, and political references, and discusses how these elements affect its development. Loosely based on an actual episode that took place in New York City in the 1980s, Guare’s Six Degrees of Separationis a contemporary play in both spirit and execution. It deals with general theme...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, his most well-known work before Six Degrees of Separation,contains the author’s darkly humorous vision of modern America. This farce features a working-class Queens zookeeper who fails as a songwriter and takes out his frustration on his insane wife. 2. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy(1925) tells the story of a young man who, to win a society girl, takes on the persona of a well-bred young man. In his attempt to hide the truth about his past, Clyde...
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English, and specializes in writing drama and film. In the following essay, he explores Guare’s use of a duality motif inSix Degrees of Separation. Guare has long been recognized as a playwright who can successfully blend the two genres of farce, a type of outrageous comedy, and tragedy. In Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation,this farce/tragedy duality is used as a structural springboard to introduce other contrasting ideas and elements, which collectively di...
Andreach, Robert, “On the Eve of the Millennium,” in Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre,Southern Illinois University Press, 1998, pp. 190, 199. Bigsby, Christopher, “John Guare,” in Contemporary American Playwrights, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999, pp. 42-43. Brustein, Robert, Review in New Republic,July 9, 1990, p. 34. Dace, T...
“Chaos and Other Mess,” in American Theatre,April 1999, p. 26. Drukman, Steven, “Prescriptions for a Troubled Theater,” in New York Times,October 31, 1999, Sec. 2, p. 1. Michner, C, “The Bard of Jackson Heights,” in New York,December 24, 1990, p. 84. Wilmeth, Don B., “John Guare,” in American Playwrights Since 1945,edited by Philip Kolin, Greenwood...
Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is a 2002 album by progressive metal band Dream Theater. English progressive rock band Arena released an album titled The Seventh Degree of Separation in 2011. The line “One degree of separation” is featured in the track Taste, from Sabrina Carpenter ’s 2024 album Short n’ Sweet.
from the play "Six Degrees of Separation" written by John Guare. (Paul, a black man in his early twenties, has conned his way into the posh New York apartment of an art dealer and his wife, Louisa ...
Dec 22, 2023 · Six Degrees of Separation is a play written by American playwright John Guare that premiered in 1990. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the Tony Award for Best Play.
People also ask
Who wrote the play 'Six Degrees of Separation'?
How many degrees of separation does 'Six Degrees of separation' have?
When did six degrees of separation come out?
Is six degrees of separation based on a true story?
Did John Guare make six degrees of separation?
Who created the theory of 6 degrees of separation?
Mar 14, 2017 · Chris Hewitt Pioneer Press March 10, 2017 Like the great “Tracey Ullman Show,” the play, “Six Degrees of Separation,” is a work of art that is now better remembered for an offshoot than for itself. Just as “Ullman” gave birth to the still-running “The Simpsons,” John Guare’s “Six Degrees of S
