Which Six People?

Six Degrees of Separation – Red Twist Theatre

Red Twist Theatre is one of my favorites in the city. Every so often it strikes me how lucky I am that next to my local coffee shop is a world-class theater. Tucked in a storefront in Edgewater, the entire theater is about the size of a modest one-bedroom apartment. The result is that the audience and the show occupy the same, small space. The first show I saw there a few years ago was their production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and I spent the play’s three hours as much in George and Martha’s living room as their actual guests.* The same sense of intimacy pervades their new production of Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s play, based on the almost unbelievable true story about a charismatic young man who charms his way into a wealthy Manhattan couple’s home pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier.

Jacqueline Gandt and Brian Parry portray the couple, Louisa and Flan. Coincidentally, they portrayed George and Martha in that production of Virginia Woolf, and it appears they have refined ‘being a dysfunctional couple’ to an art. Their easy and unforced familiarity that can veer credibly between affection and derision at a moment anchors the first half of the show. When a young man calling himself Paul shows up on their door, claiming to know their children from college and is the apparent victim of a mugging, they invite him in. He dazzles them with stories of his youth traveling Europe as the son of a Hollywood legend. You can sense the dissatisfaction in their own lives that would make them jump so willingly and so easily at the taste of glamour, or at least change of pace, the young man offers. Gandt, in particular, has to sell both being taken in by Paul, but also that experience has some value outside of being reduced to an anecdote once the deception is revealed. She does so in spades.

Donovan Session, as the charismatic Paul, has an unenviable and long list of things to accomplish over the course of the show. He has to be charming enough to not just credibly deceive Louisa and Flan, but the audience, too. He is more than up to the task. A brilliant smile and an energy that practically hums from under his skin make him a compelling and sympathetic character, even when he does unsympathetic things. Underlying Session’s performance is the sense that Paul believes, needs to believe, the stories he tells more than anyone. Even after his deceptions take a darker turn with some darker consequences in the second half of the story, you never lose the sense that he is not acting out of malice, but a desire to feel love. He can so expertly manipulate everyone else’s longing for connection not because he is some kind of sociopath, but he knows that feeling all too well.

The supporting cast, comprised of Paul’s other marks and their children, who inadvertently provided Paul with the information he needed to deceive them all, is also stellar. I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling the second half of the show. I will only add that Devon Nimerfroh as Rick delivers a monologue about his encounter with Paul that I still haven’t stopped thinking about.

For a show about deception, the show itself is quite good at it. The story it begins to tell is a fairly predictable one about how secretly dissatisfied rich people must be with their lives. By the end, anchored by a final, fascinating exchange between Louisa and Paul, the show becomes a study on the lies we all tell, to ourselves and others, and the role that plays in making us who we are. At the start of the show, it is easy to dismiss Flan and Louisa as an unhappy couple whose unhappiness made them easy marks. By the end, you can see that ache for connection in all of us. The play takes its name, of course, from the theory that any two people in the world can be connected in six or fewer people, but as Louisa asks, how do you find the right six people?

The show makes excellent use of the theater’s small space. Presented in the round and inches from your seat, the staging makes you feel in the action and allows the actors to break the fourth wall seamlessly, something that can feel gimmicky in larger spaces. The cast is not confined to the dead center of the room and the action flows on and off stage and conversations can take place with actors at its opposite edges. The result is dynamic but not chaotic, and I almost want to go again and sit somewhere else just to see if proximity to a different actor might make me see the scene differently.

Ultimately, this production of Six Degrees manages to thread the difficult needle of finding something to say while neither beating you over the head with its point or rendering it needlessly opaque in an attempt to seem more interesting. Between the aforementioned production of Virginia Woolf and Parry’s recent star turn as Richard Nixon in Red Twist’s production of Frost/Nixon, I went into this show with some very high expectations and I was not disappointed.

*As a side note, I liked the production of Virginia Woolf so much, I bought a piece of the set at auction. It is a framed Parcheesi board. It hangs, appropriately I feel, over my bar.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

 

Presented September 3-October 7, by Red Twist Theatre, 1044 W, Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Tickets are available by calling 773-728-7529 or by going to www.redtwist.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.