Six Degrees of Separation

Odds are against a nearly 20-year-old take on impression management finding resonance in a time when public servants’ dirty laundry is hung out to dry over CNN microphones and relationships are declared and dissolved on Facebook. But Guare’s taut 90-minute tour de force—especially in Scott’s deft staging, stocked with a talented Eclipse cast—doesn’t feel dated and, in fact, trimly prefigures our new tell-all century when everybody’s business is unavoidably everybody else’s business.

Back in 1990, New Yorkers very much like Six Degrees’ wealthy aesthetes Ouisa and Flan—a white Manhattan power couple who end up the hapless patsies of a seemingly collegiate black con man claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son—queued up in droves for its Broadway run, perhaps due to an unnerving sense that the based-on-a-true-story story could happen to them. Appearing to excavate commerce and class, the play digs even deeper to expose a stark, universal desire for human connection. “You let me use all the parts of myself,” Michael Pogue’s Paul tells Ouisa after the jig is up, giving in one part of a highly detailed, keen performance a tantalizing hint at what drives this bafflingly troubled kid. The ensemble portraying Paul’s pawns—from the overemphatic Manhattanites and their petulant kids to a fresh-off-the-mountain Utah couple—skillfully helps Pogue sell Paul’s game. Karen Yates’s Ouisa needs (and likely will find as the run continues) a slightly tighter clasp on that crucial role; it’s she who’s the most willing to be manipulated—and to connect.

• More theater reviews
• More Theater articles