I'm not a director, but if I were, this is the one play I would love to stage. "Six Degrees of Separation" is a meditation on trust and friendship, as we witness a group of disconnected characters caught up in one lie that grows and grows and grows. It's a portrait of lonely people, at heart, and asks where the line is drawn between true experience, and the coldness of living only for anecdotes. The dialogue is crisp and alternates between hilarity and tears. The film - with Will Smith and Stockard Channing - is greatly enjoyable, but I'd love to see it performed on stage with actors of the same calibre. ( )

An uptown New York couple take in a young black man for the night when he's mugged as he tells them that he is both a friend of their children and the son of Sydney Poitier.

Not sure I got everything going on in this play but it was entertaining listening. ( )

The experience of reading this play for the first time, not knowing what would happen, was amazing. The movie version doesn't even come close to doing it justice. ( )

Sometimes once a play gets made into a movie, it's easy for the play to get lost. This play stands well on its own, and doesn't need all the props of a movie to carry it. The set is actually very simple (and surreal in many places). The premise isn't unique - a con man manages to get a bunch of self-important people to take him seriously - but the execution is original. The writing catches the cynical cleverness of the not-quite rich but highly educated, and yet it isn't just another swipe at pretentiousness. Guare takes his characters seriously, and appears to like at least some of them. He strips away the false pretensions and allows us to see the people underneath, without sneering at either the haves or the have nots. Worth reading over again for the subtle plot points you missed the first time. ( )

The play is so short! 50 pages only. I liked the idea and to be honest I'd have liked it to be developed into something more. As it is, I feel I didn't "get" it, that I missed something, because it was over so quickly.