Six Degrees of Separation won a slew of prestigious awards in 1991, including Best Play (New York Drama Critics Circle), Best Director (Drama Desk and Tony Awards), and Outstanding Playwright (Obie and Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Awards).
The play is indeed a tour de force, but not an emotional one. Intellectually interesting but not profound, it comments on race, class, and sex relations, and on honesty and corruption in society. The characters pack a sort of power, their speeches provoke and possess, but they are insufficiently developed and their sleazy nature makes sympathetic identification with them difficult if not impossible.
The depiction of corruption need not result in a play's failure. Shakespeare's Richard III is despicable, but the drama entrances us because his personality develops convincingly and the poety is exciting. In Six Degrees these criteria are only inconsistently met.
The title refers to a statement by Ouisa Kittredge, adroitly played by Stockard Channing in the Broadway production, that all persons are related to each other by only six degrees of separation; she says she is “bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people” (p. 81). The play demonstrates this by showing several different relationships between the play's protagonists, Paul and Mr. and Mrs. Kittredge, and various minor players. Paul is a psychopathic black adolescent who skillfully cons the Kittredges into taking him into their home and giving him money, which he uses to pay a male prostitute to spend the night with him there. Paul pretends he is Sidney Poitier's son and a college friend of the Kittredges' children. In his dealings with the Kittredges he skirts the law, remaining sufficiently within legal limits that they cannot accuse him of a criminal act. Mr. Kittredge (Flan) resembles Paul in that he uses his wiles to entice wealthy people to buy and sell art for huge profits. Indeed, Paul helps him convince a South African millionaire to invest in a Cezanne painting that will then be sold to Japanese buyers for a much greater sum. Flan knows about art, even appreciates it, but his greater love is for money.
Ouisa, his wife, accepts the money, celebrates its acquisition, is her husband's “partner,” but has more of a conscience about it and about her relations with Paul, to whose intellectual and emotional seduction, with its sexual overtones, she succumbs. Both she and Flan are impressed by the young man's exposition of The Catcher in the Rye (his pretended college thesis) and are taken in when he appeals to their vanity by offering them roles in the movie version of Cats, which Poitier will supposedly produce.
Ouisa, like her husband and Paul, has a deceptive streak. She lies to Paul so that he will reveal his whereabouts and turn himself in. She says she will care for him, and even let him stay with them when he is released from jail.
That is the first type of closeness humans enjoy. We are all like Paul, dishonest to a greater or lesser degree, in different ways, legal or illegal, justified or unjustified. We all partook of the eighties, the age of greed, the author implies.
A second type of closeness is more emotionallibidinal. For Ouisa did not lie completely to Paul. When Paul's sociopathy, along perhaps with psychopathological defensive structure, fails and his deep despair and yearning for care rise to the surface, she responds with loving, maternal feelings, loosely integrated with her hostile maternal deceptiveness. She becomes in fact more attached to Paul than to her three teenage offspring. This is perhaps a defensive displacement, but it is a cruel one.
The story in its broad outlines may sound moving and convincing; many analysts will enjoy deducing its dynamics. But ultimately, the play is neither emotionally nor intellectually satisfying. It is difficult to convince oneself that these parents and adolescents are fighting an attraction to each other with sadomasochistic, hostile interchanges—a dynamic often operating in actual cases—or that Paul's unconscionable behavior is motivated by a need for love. The corruption depicted here seems too fundamental, the failures of conscience too great, the integrity (in both senses) of the characters insufficient. As a result, they do not hold together. At once too simple and too fragmented, they lack the power to move us.