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Suddenly, an interruption: the doorman brings in a young black man, who is bleeding, saying he needs their help and is a Harvard classmate of Ouisa’s and Flan’s children. They are hosting an old friend, Geoffrey (Michael Siberry), who lives in South Africa (this is back in the apartheid era) and is even wealthier than they are they’re trying to seduce him into investing in a private art deal Flan badly needs to pull off. The play opens with the wealthy Ouisa (Allison Janney) and her husband Flan (John Benjamin Hickey) talking directly to the audience, contradicting each other, nudging us toward the perception of reality they want us to see.
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He creates a loud, hysterical environment that may have been intended to play as farce to show how artificial the world of the elite is but instead frequently flops, creating a distance between the play and the audience. Unfortunately, Trip Cullman’s dubious direction steers swaths of the play-especially in the middle (already the weakest section)-well off the mark. And not just in the echoes of the presidential campaign in the characters of Ouisa, the wealthy and insular Upper East Sider, and Paul, the street hustler she takes in after being taken in by his con. John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (in revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre) debuted in 1990 when Hillary Clinton was a governor’s wife and Donald Trump was a sleazy, egomaniacal real estate millionaire yet the play still resonates powerfully today. She is well-intentioned and can be warm one-on-one but has lived in a bubble for so long she projects as smug and phony every word he says is a lie yet he thrums with an intensity that has his audience leaning in, desperate to believe him.