Con Game

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

by John Guare

Like his most famous play, The House of Blue Leaves, John Guare's wry new off-Broadway work concerns the almost mystical longing of the unfamous for contact with celebrities. The odd title derives from a theory that any two people, no matter how distant in geography or circumstance, are linked by a chain of acquaintances: A knows B, who knows C, and so on. Thus the most renowned figure will turn out to be a friend of a friend of a friend. When a well-spoken young black man bursts into a Manhattan millionaire couple's home, bleeding from an apparent mugging and claiming to be both a Harvard chum of their children and the son of Sidney Poitier, the startled Wasp hosts believe him. They accept even his screwiest assertion, that he can get them bit parts in a film of Cats to be directed by his father, because they, like most victims of confidence tricks, are blinded by vanity.

The story, based on an actual incident, takes on deep resonances in Guare's fiction. It becomes a metaphor for liberals' fantasies of rescuing the poor. It confronts the ambivalence that the sane feel toward the mentally ill: when the con man, deftly played by James McDaniel, seems to reveal a pathological belief in his own fantasies, the wife, played by the ever splendid Stockard Channing, vacillates between compassion and revulsion. And the encounter devastatingly sketches the uneasy state of U.S. race relations, in which white liberals may endorse the black cause in theory, yet not know any blacks socially and thus fawn on or patronize them. When the intruder starts to analyze The Catcher in the Rye in scholarly jargon, the hosts are spellbound by his vocabulary and miss the fact that his rap becomes comic nonsense.