Racial issues dominate the play–more clearly now, perhaps, in the wake of the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent LA riots than was apparent when the play premiered in 1990. Butterfly, Guare found in the Hampton incident inspiration for a complex, far-reaching, sardonic yet compassionate study of racial, sexual, and economic barriers, and of the now-crumbling towers of illusion that American society constructed during the 1980s. (Hampton, who served 21 months in prison, recently filed a suit seeking $100 million from Guare and others involved in the creation of Six Degrees of Separation, on the grounds that he was entitled to “the fruits of his labor.” He lost.) Like David Henry Hwang, who transformed an oddball espionage case into a critique of East-West cultural misconceptions in M. The story of Paul and the Kittredges is based on a true case, widely reported in the early 1980s, of one David Hampton. After all, they’re suckers for art, and Paul is truly a work of art–a self-invented cultural collage who keeps adding elements he picks up from his “patrons.”
He’s Paul Poitier, he says, a classmate of Flan and Ouisa’s daughter at Harvard. One night he bursts into Flan and Ouisa’s apartment, bleeding from a wound he says he got from a knife-wielding mugger.
After all, you can’t pretend to be the son of Sidney Poitier if you’re not black.
That’s important because the people Paul swindles are white–and because he uses his blackness as part of his deception. It’s also embodied in a penniless young man–whose real identity no one ever learns–who lies his way into the lives of these well-meaning fools. This deception is not limited to them, or to others of their affluent class. Like the double-sided canvas, this middle-aged liberal-chic couple mask jumbled, chaotic emotions behind a stylish, well-ordered facade–a set of illusions they’ve evolved to carry them through their public and private lives. The Kittredges are art acquirers, and paintings like the Kandinsky define their lives–more than they realize. The other side is completely abstract, a turbulent arrangement of vivid colors dominated by a threatening splash of black. The side visible most of the time is a cool study of cosmic geometry: spheres and stars floating in the dark eternity of space. Encased in a fine gilded frame (echoed, in Tony Walton’s brilliant set design, in the gold-edged trimming around the apartment’s doors and along its spacious, abyss-like black walls), the painting is actually double-sided. Suspended over the living room of Flan and Ouisa Kittredge–the play’s protagonists and narrators, in whose Manhattan apartment most of the action is set–is a painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Modern art hangs heavy over the lives of the characters in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation.
#SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION DEFINITION SERIES#
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).Best of Chicago 2021 ballot (Bonus round of nominations starts 12/22).
0 kommentar(er)
