He soon lets slip that his father is none other than groundbreaking actor Sidney Poitier.
Paul (Corey Hawkins) has been mugged-his money and his thesis was stolen-and his father won’t be in town until morning. Suddenly, an interruption: the doorman brings in a young black man, who is bleeding, saying he needs their help and is a Harvard classmate of Ouisa’s and Flan’s children. They are hosting an old friend, Geoffrey (Michael Siberry), who lives in South Africa (this is back in the apartheid era) and is even wealthier than they are they’re trying to seduce him into investing in a private art deal Flan badly needs to pull off.
The play opens with the wealthy Ouisa (Allison Janney) and her husband Flan (John Benjamin Hickey) talking directly to the audience, contradicting each other, nudging us toward the perception of reality they want us to see. He creates a loud, hysterical environment that may have been intended to play as farce to show how artificial the world of the elite is but instead frequently flops, creating a distance between the play and the audience. Unfortunately, Trip Cullman’s dubious direction steers swaths of the play-especially in the middle (already the weakest section)-well off the mark. And not just in the echoes of the presidential campaign in the characters of Ouisa, the wealthy and insular Upper East Sider, and Paul, the street hustler she takes in after being taken in by his con. John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (in revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre) debuted in 1990 when Hillary Clinton was a governor’s wife and Donald Trump was a sleazy, egomaniacal real estate millionaire yet the play still resonates powerfully today. Finally, a commentary follows each monologue, alerting the actor to details in the speech that could help him/her perform it better.She is well-intentioned and can be warm one-on-one but has lived in a bubble for so long she projects as smug and phony every word he says is a lie yet he thrums with an intensity that has his audience leaning in, desperate to believe him. A brief sketch of the character is also given, utilizing, where possible, the playwright's own words. Organized for maximum benefit to the actor gleaning for background material, individual selections are introduced with a summary of the play's action up to the point the speech begins. Updating the popular "Modern Monologues," this fresh collection of speeches represents the best American and English playwrights of today including Caryl Churchill, Ariel Dorfman, John Guare, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman.
The Contemporary Monologue" is an exciting selection of speeches of all types, serious and comic, realistic and absurdist, drawn from plays written by contemporary playwrights over the past ten years.
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