You’re rich and living on Fifth Avenue. Suddenly a young black man appears at the door, bleeding, saying he’s been mugged, and claiming that he knows your sons, who are at Harvard. He’s preppily dressed, charming and articulate and he deftly convinces you that he’s the son of Sidney Poitier, so you ask him in and even give him a bed, inwardly congratulating yourself on your enlightenment. But somehow he sneaks a rentboy into his room during the night and, you later learn, is a conman and thief. You are, you decide, lucky not to have been murdered by a boy who is probably a crackhead.
The play that John Guare based on a real-life case and staged in New York in 1990 has dated just a bit. The satire of well-heeled liberals, represented mainly by the art-dealing couple played by Anthony Head and Lesley Manville, seems over-familiar in 2010. And though their shrill, spoilt kids are funny (“you creep, no wonder Mom left you”) they’re no more than caricatures. Yet Guare’s piece still has legs, mainly because of the contradictions of the boy who calls himself Paul Poitier but never reveals his real name.
Let’s concede that it’s unlikely that a gay college boy could transform a ghetto kid into a male counterpart of Eliza Dolittle, complete with elegant manners, upmarket accent and a capacity to philosophise and talk about Chekhov and Beckett. But there’s a truth behind and beyond that improbability, which is that criminals are often fantasists who get to believe and even become their own myths. For Obi Abili’s charismatic Paul, Sidney Poitier really is his father and his ploys and pretences reflect what he feels, wants, needs and almost is.
Is it sentimental to suggest, as Guare does, that Paul has a hunger to learn about art lost to Head’s self-satisfied Flan, for whom a C?zanne is now a source of profit? Or to show Manville’s Ouisa trying to befriend and help the self-confessed conman? Maybe. And is the play’s title, which suggests that there’s a six-person chain linking everyone on the planet to everyone else, a lot of nonsense? Probably. Yet there’s still something troubling and touching in Guare’s portrait of fragmentation, rootlessness and a young man’s attempt to reinvent himself through the power of his imagination. Last night I felt that Six Degrees was worth the lively, absorbing revival David Grindley has given it.
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