Six Degrees of Separation

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 Stockard Channing - is greatly enjoyable, but I'd love to see it performed on stage with actors of the same calibre.

Sometimes once a play gets made into a movie, it's easy for the play to get lost. This play stands well on its own, and doesn't need all the props of a movie to carry it. The set is actually very simple (and surreal in many places). The premise isn't unique - a con man manages to get a bunch of self-important people to take him seriously - but the execution is original. The writing catches the cynical cleverness of the not-quite rich but highly educated, and yet it isn't just another swipe at pretentiousness. Guare takes his characters seriously, and appears to like at least some of them. He strips away the false pretensions and allows us to see the people underneath, without sneering at either the haves or the have nots. Worth reading show more over again for the subtle plot points you missed the first time. show less

LATW version. A play ripped from (now very old) headlines, with some good rapid fire dialogue that serves no greater purpose. Is it supposed to be biting satire on the out of touch upper class? About finding compassion with the plight of the hustler? It's not funny enough to be comedy, and the drama of rich people getting swindled isn't particularly gripping.

This book is awful upon first and second reading, and then improves substantially with respect to each additional frustrating try. very good, very good.
"Imagination is God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable." Self examination? Bearable?
Idea of difference as a product of the imagination is compelling in that it makes the individual extraordinarily powerful for better or worse-- one has the ability to reform one's life simply by being open to a wider perspective? At the same time, the individual has to choose between fragile emotional security and only potentially beneficial risk-taking. the dominance of the former is evidence that this is easier said than done.

This is a powerful play, and so interestingly put together that you won't be able to stop reading once you start. The characters are strangely realistic, and the writing beautiful. This is worth reading or staging.

An uptown New York couple take in a young black man for the night when he's mugged as he tells them that he is both a friend of their children and the son of Sydney Poitier.

Not sure I got everything going on in this play but it was entertaining listening.

I play that I read when I was 16. I liked it then. but mind you, my life was quite different. about an art dealer in Chi and a man who convinces them to buy. very much a play.