Currently on San Diego stages are two plays by masterful living playwrights John Guare and John Patrick Shanley. Both plays were made into highly successful films, one of them (Shanley’s “Doubt”) an obvious Oscar contender playing in local cinemas. Seen at the Old Globe the evening of Jan. 17, Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” resonates differently but no less mightily than it did when seen nearly two decades ago on stage and screen. The 1990 Broadway play led to a 1993 film that first brought young sitcom star Will Smith to serious public attention. The core metaphor of this dense 90-minute roller coaster of a play, staged here by Trip Cullman in his Globe directorial debut, is contained in the last words spoken by protagonist Ouisa Kittredge about the Kandinsky work that hangs in her posh New York apartment: “The Kandinsky … it’s painted on two sides.” Though no solutions to any of the mysteries presented in the play are spelled out, this line ties up everything neatly. Just as the Kandinsky has two sides, so do human beings. The other key in the Globe’s dazzling production is handed over by Andromache Chalfant’s astonishing scenic design, which opens up, as a dream might, to reveal unexplored vistas that could represent possibilities for a less proscribed and plastic life for the awakened protagonist, Ouisa Kittredge. Ouisa (the magnificent Karen Ziemba) is married to Flan (Thomas Jay Ryan), an art dealer who specializes in selling privately owned masterworks out of their fancy Manhattan living room. A wealthy South African client (Tony Torn) arrives for pre-dinner cocktails when suddenly the bleeding and shaken Paul arrives. He is portrayed by UCSD MFA graduate Samuel Stricklen, remembered in numerous UCSD productions, including Darko Tresnjak’s “La Dispute.” Paul, who gets more and more intriguing, is a young African-American who says he was victimized in a Central Park mugging in which he lost his luggage and his wallet. He claims to be a Harvard classmate of the Kittredges’ children and furthermore, the son of Sidney Poitier, whom he is to meet the next morning for breakfast. Obviously of high intelligence, Paul cooks a gourmet meal for the trio of sophisticates. He speaks intelligently of artists and then delivers a heady theoretical discourse about the novel “Catcher in the Rye.” Of course Paul is invited to stay overnight. The illusion is shattered the next morning when Ouisa discovers him with a naked male prostitute (beautiful Joaquin Perez-Campbell, seen recently, but not so completely, in “Back Back Back”). The Kittredges are not the only ones in their smart set duped by Paul, hence the “six degrees of separation” comparison. Over the course of the play, in direct address and in played-out scenes, the audience learns that all is not as it appears in marital and parent-child relationships, hence the duality represented by the Kandinsky, which is geometrical on one side and chaotic on the other. The ensemble of young and older people is quite impressive, as are the three leads, but it’s the set that accompanies one home. “Six Degrees of Separation” continues through Feb. 15 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park. For tickets and information, visit www.theoldglobe.org or call (619) 23-GLOBE.
