SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
The young man is black. That’s important because the people Paul swindles are white–and because he uses his blackness as part of his deception. After all, you can’t pretend to be the son of Sidney Poitier if you’re not black. One night he bursts into Flan and Ouisa’s apartment, bleeding from a wound he says he got from a knife-wielding mugger. He’s Paul Poitier, he says, a classmate of Flan and Ouisa’s daughter at Harvard. And Flan and Ouisa believe him. After all, they’re suckers for art, and Paul is truly a work of art–a self-invented cultural collage who keeps adding elements he picks up from his “patrons.”
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Ouisa’s confrontation with this lack of connection provides the play’s emotional crisis. Moved by the poignance of Paul’s escalating pathology, Ouisa finds her own well-adjusted existence as fraudulent as the scheme she’s been suckered by. It’s a conclusion the audience has arrived at much earlier: almost from the start of the play, as they’ve watched this bright-eyed butterfly moue and mince her way through cocktail-hour conversation with a prospective art investor. Talking about Ukrainian labor strife, Ouisa reflects: “The phrase–striking coal miners–I see all these very striking coal miners modeling the fall fashions . . .” This is not a woman to take seriously–yet she becomes one, providing the only caring response to Paul’s self-destructive career.
