A sympathetic character is a character who is generally likeable. What character do you find most sympathetic (most likeable) in this play? What character do you find least sympathetic?
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In six Degrees of Seperation
G Playwright John Guare was born in 1930 in New York City. In addition to Six Degrees of Separation, his 1990 stage play that was adapted for the screen in 1993, his significant works include House of Blue Leaves (1971) and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1995). Guare is considered one of the most important American playwrights of the last third of the twentieth century, along with David Mamet and August Wilson.
According to Gene Plunka, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Guare is motivated by scorn for the fraudulence of American life. His protagonists fail to connect with others and their own unique sense of individuality. Instead they are lured by the glitz and glamour of the promised American Dream.” Guare has said of himself that he writes about people who eventually come to question exactly who they are, people on a quest to find their true selves.
Plunka also observes that “Guare’s characters have no time for relationships . . . and thus are left with [lives that are] passionless, love-starved, and devoid of friendship or spirituality” (106).
Consider the characters Ouisa and Flan, from Six Degrees, and how either of them might be on a quest to find their true self, or alternatively, might be leading a passionless, love-starved life that is devoid of spirituality. Consider how the character Paul helps to highlight this quality of Ouisa or Flan.
In writing about another of Guare’s famous plays, Plunka says that House of Blue Leaves “touches an American conscience that dreams of a more perfect life yet refuses to recognize the intrinsic value of relationships based on shared experiences” (113). In other words, Americans are so preoccupied with pursuing what we call the American Dream that we have no time to form community, to connect with each other, and that we are at best individualistic, or at worst self-centered, avaricious, and isolated (alienated) from each other. These qualities of American life–these artistic concerns of Guare’s–are presented as well through the characters, imagery, and plot of Six Degrees.
Guare himself was inspired to write Six Degrees after reading the newspaper account of a man who had conned his way into a couple’s apartment by telling them that he knew their children. (See “Author’s Preface,” Six Degrees, page 6.) The news story itself is, in a sense, an anecdote that reduces or diminishes the experience. But the play itself is an attempt to fit into life, as Ouisa says (61) an experience, to take account of a real human life in a way that is permanent and lasting. This is the essence of art. Think about how writing down a story is a way of keeping something, how art is attempt to freeze life. Somewhere in between the experience and the anecdote is what we call “art.” Engaging in art is to awaken that blank space between the two extremes, the bookends. As Flan says of his children at school, the first grade was blotches of green and black, the third grade was camouflage, but the second was Matisse. The third grade camouflage is utterly controlled. The first grade is wild, chaotic, unorganized, and elusive. The second grade is just right!
Ouisa’s lament to Flan is that we don’t slow down enough to relish life, that we too often try to package our lives for easy consumption, denying the complexity, the electricity, the depth, the richness of the events that happen to us:
We become these human juke boxes spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?
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