Never shedding his winsome smile, Paul's delusional tale leads him into a very astute monologue about The Catcher in the Rye and its phony-averse protagonist Holden Caulfield. But Corey Hawkins, whose performance sparks with charisma and intellectual hyperactivity, could sell the tale to Sidney Poitier and Andrew Lloyd Webber at the same cocktail party. It's not much of a spoiler to say that none of this turns out to be true.
#Six degrees of separation monologues movie
Paul explains that not only does he attend Harvard with two of their kids, he's the son of famous actor Sydney Poitier, who may even be able to land the couple roles in a movie adaptation of Cats (a satisfying roast of the infamous musical ensues).Ĭorey Hawkins delivers his monologue as Paul in Six Degrees of Separation. If you're thinking "stranger danger," don't worry. Bleeding, he claims to have been violently robbed and now needs a place to stay for the night. Suddenly, a handsome young man named Paul comes stumbling into Ouisa and Flan's apartment looking for help. It's in this frozen moment that Ouisa wisps us through the story of Paul in 90 minutes: There they are, entertaining their rich friend Geoffrey (Michael Siberry) - and soliciting a potential $2 million investment from him for a Cézanne painting that art dealer Flan (a perfectly repressed John Benjamin Hickey) has his eye on.
Mark Wendland has even designed the Kittredges' fancy dwellings like a story that's been boiled down to its flashiest highlights - a bright-red carpet and scrim centered around a few pieces of furniture and a two-sided Kandinsky painting that's been paused on its more contained, geometric side (Ben Stanton and Lucy Mackinnon add creative lighting and projections, respectively). Directed with laser precision by Trip Cullman, the whole production is shaped like one large, sparsely detailed anecdote. She's one of the only actors who could follow in the footsteps of original Ouisa, Stockard Channing (whose performance was immortalized in the 1993 film), offering the same combination of command, vulnerability, and wry wit. Of course, an anecdote is exactly what we're getting from our narrator Ouisa, played to perfection by Allison Janney.
#Six degrees of separation monologues series
Somewhere, 21st-century versions of dissatisfied spouses Ouisa and Flan Kittredge are still hosting friends in their sprawling apartment where they brag about their Ivy League children, ogle their multimillion dollar paintings, and perhaps, as Ouisa does, yearn to capture the "experience" of life in something more than a series pithy anecdotes that we "spill out like human juke boxes" over glasses of expensive wine. Many things have changed in the 26 years since John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation made its Broadway debut - but the Upper East Side dinner party is not one of them.
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