Six Degrees of Separation. - New York, New York - theater reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1990 by Eva Resnikova

Slouching down Broadway

YOU KNOW, it's a dull season on Broadway when extra-theatrical events consistently upstage anything happening onstage. The offstage shenanigans began with the Miss Saigon row [see "Eastern Standard," NR, Sept. 17]. This was followed by the Oh, Kay! scandal, with David Merrick, the veteran producer famous for his unorthodox publicity schemes, lodging a protest against New York Times theater critic Frank Rich in the form of a poison-pen valentine, which managed to get past the advertising-acceptability department and into the first edition of the Newspaper of Record before being pulled: a heart enclosing derogatory quotations about the show from the pens of both Mr. Rich and his girlfriend, newly ensconced Times theatrical-gossip columnist Alex Witchel, who attended the show with Mr. Rich and, according to Mr. Merrick, giggled, whispered, and nudged the chief critic throughout. Ten days later, a large chunk of high-tech scenery KO'd leading man Philip Casnoff during a preview of Shogun, ending the performance and leading to speculation as to whether the already troubled show would go on. Mr. Merrick was reportedly furious at the change in focus in theatrical gossip.

Onstage, Broadway has been especially weak this season in serious, or even comic, drama. Apart from a Miser at Circle in the Square redeemed solely by Philip Bosco's performance in the title role, there are only two straight plays, both of which originated elsewhere. An off-Broadway transfer, John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation is the lone original American play of the season. Loosely based on a true story, Six Degrees of Separation concerns an impostor who passes himself off as the Harvard-educated son of Sidney Poitier and insinuates himself, through the flattery of wanting to be just like them, into the lives of wealthy, sophisticated New Yorkers whose own children reject their values and choices. Part comedy of manners, part morality tale, all brilliantly directed by Jerry Zaks, the play is clever, entertaining, and engaging--though not, I fear, the transcendent experience insisted upon by some of its champions.

The greatest hurdle of the evening is suspending disbelief sufficiently to accept the premise of the impostor's transformation. After all, even Eliza Doolittle was trained only to make small talk, not to hold forth on weighty intellectual topics. Courtney Vance's difficulties with upper-class enunciation do not help matters. But Stockard Channing gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as the society matron whose encounter with the fatally charming outsider awakens in her the suspicion that there is something essential lacking in her hitherto largely unexamined life.