John Guare

First things first: read this play in one sitting.

Seriously. You've got to read it all at once. There are no acts or scene breaks and the dialogue and action is continuous, plus it's only 55 pages, so read it in one sitting.

Onto the play itself. It's brilliant. Or at least I thought it was. It's clever—very clever—but it never becomes pretentious or crosses the line into self-indulgence. The dialogue never seems separated from the action, in fact it conveys the action, it is the action. show more It's intelligent and breathless and effervescent, with characters constantly finishing each other's sentences and speaking on the phone and speaking to the audience, but it's smooth, too, transitioning seamlessly from flashbacks and reminiscences to dream sequences and fights.

"Seamlessness" seems to be a word used a lot in praise of this play—in fact, on the back of my copy, it's used in two of the three blurbs:

"...cunningly executed, seemingly seamlessly joined, interlarded with clever one-liners, alternating comic situations with mildly disturbing ones... SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION is a play about everything, with something in it for everyone..." —New York Magazine

"Among the many remarkable aspects of Mr. Guare's writing is the seamlessness of his imagery, characters and themes, as if this play had erupted from his own imagination in one perfect piece." —The New York Times

"In one perfect piece." That's how I'd describe it, too. Which is funny because Guare, in his preface, talks about the inherent difficulty of writing and of getting back to that which is truly "us," and in doing so he tries to get us to believe that he has slaved over this play, but I still suspect that it only took him as long as it takes to physically type up the script—two days, max. Which makes me incredibly envious.

Sure, there's more to it than brilliant writing. There are larger concepts churning behind all this wonderful dialogue—love, death, class, the value of the imagination, the purpose of deception, the fragmented nature of a life—but the great thing about Six Degrees of Separation is that even if you don't bother thinking about any of these themes and just take the play on its face, it's still wonderful. Which seems impossible, because like The Times said above, everything is so SEAMLESSLY bound up together, characters-themes-dialogue-plot, but the magic of this play is that somehow, somehow (is it magic?) they all stand on their own too.

Before I go, I want to mention the movie adaptation. I actually watched it before reading the play (sacrilege, I know—but, in my defence, I didn't know it was an adaptation until after I saw it!) and loved it. I have a lot more respect for it after reading the source material, too; the script is almost exactly the same, word for word. All the actors are great and I highly recommend it—the ending is slightly more definitive than the play's ending, too—plus the casting, in my opinion, is spot on. Young, gay Will Smith! (I'm pretty sure this was his debut movie, too.) Hippie Anthony Michael Hall! South African Ian McKellen! Stockard Channing & Donald Sutherland at their most charming! What could be better? And if, for some unfathomable reason, you don't want to read the play and want to watch it instead, I'm confident that you'd get alllllmost as much out of the movie as you would out of the play, since they're so close.

All in all, I loved this play, I loved this story. There are some really breathtaking monologues and witty exchanges and the dialogue is generally noteworthy, but taken as a whole, this play is just something else. Five stars, easy. show less

I'm not a director, but if I were, this is the one play I would love to stage. "Six Degrees of Separation" is a meditation on trust and friendship, as we witness a group of disconnected characters caught up in one lie that grows and grows and grows. It's a portrait of lonely people, at heart, and asks where the line is drawn between true experience, and the coldness of living only for anecdotes. The dialogue is crisp and alternates between hilarity and tears. The film - with Will Smith and show more Stockard Channing - is greatly enjoyable, but I'd love to see it performed on stage with actors of the same calibre. show less

Though not as sublime as Six Degrees of Separation, the plays in this collection demonstrate again the skill of a master playwright. These two plays look at love and madness, murder and death. If that makes them sound banal...well, the real skill is in how to deal with subjects that on the face of it sound trite. These works are not trite. And as with any good work of art, they leave you with more questions than answers. What is the responsibility we have to each other? Do artists have an show more obligation to consider their subject? What is the nature of sin and guilt? Guare challenges us to look at ourselves by creating characters we aren't (quite) like, and letting us peek voyeuristically at their lives. We cringe, but can't turn away. show less

Mostly short plays from the award-winning playwright; the title play is full length, but the rest are one-acts. The author, as usual, doesn't bother to observe the conventions of theatre, but allows the characters to break through time and space, talk to the audience, back up when they need to, and move forward when it's time. This is one of the things that makes him great; when they show him a rule, he immediately breaks it. Very few of these plays observe the standard "three-act" show more beginning, middle, and end structure. They begin when they begin, end when they end, and wander wherever they want to in the middle. Somehow they manage to get where they are going, and the characters often have no "arc" that's worth mentioning. In spite of such blatant disregard for the "rules" of his art, most of what he does work. Favorite line - If I had a baby, I wouldn't let it hang glide. show less