THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 31, 1996 TAG: 9601300134
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater Review
SOURCE: Montague Gammon III
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
Suppose Cezanne had been a playwright instead of a painter?
John Guare apparently posed himself that question when he wrote ``Six Degrees of Separation,'' which a talented cast is now performing at the Little Theatre of Virginia Beach.
Though the script takes an episodic, non-linear approach to storytelling and disregards some conventions that commonly delineate audience and performer, its substance is not unfamiliar.
It's no complaint to describe this as another play about unlikely allegiances, nor to say that it draws its power from the poignancy of wasted potential and the yearning for what ``might have been.''
It is also well supplied with funny moments. Guare takes a satirical look at the attitudes of young adults and adolescents, gets in a few good digs at trends in current commercial theater and skewers human vanity.
If the sentiments are familiar, the format Guare uses to convey them is less so, though hardly revolutionary. Genuine experiments in non-traditional staging and truly unconventional plotting were fermenting in American theater between 25 and 45 years ago.
In ``Six Degrees of Separation,'' a young black man charms his way into the confidence of a well-to-do New York couple. He claims to be a friend of their children from prep school, and backs up that claim with extensive knowledge of the family. He also claims to be a son of Sidney Poitier by the actor's first wife.
The brief first act takes the story, though not in strictly chronological order, from the dramatic entrance that ``Paul Poitier,'' bleeding and claiming to have been mugged, makes into the apartment of Flan and Ouisa Kitteridge. It follows the story through a dinner he cooks for them and an evening he spends in their company to his expulsion from the apartment the next morning.
The second act relates young Paul's encounters with other upper crust New Yorkers, their search for him and for the source of his knowledge about them.
Flan Kitteridge is an art dealer whose references to a Cezanne that he is attempting to buy and sell provide a clue to this script's structure.
The disjointed episodes, the monologues addressed to the audience as if the actor were speaking to friends in his home, the shifting viewpoints from which this story is told are like the distinct, small flat elements that Cezanne used to build up his pictures and which art critics call ``facet planes.''
The play is not hard to follow, any more than it is hard to recognize the roof-tops and leaves and walls and roads in Cezanne's pictures.
All this theorizing should not make anyone think the production is dry or overly intellectual. An enthusiastic audience warmly appreciated both the play and the acting opening night.
Jonathan White is smooth as Paul, and Bob Burchette gives a graceful, easily convincing performance as Flan.
Any number of familiar players make watchable appearances as people whom Paul encounters. Ian Goodwin, Sam Hakim, Bob Scott and Liz Meenan are in that group, along with Lee Christopher, David Olson, Jim Mitchell and Ben Hebner III.
As the teenage and collegiate children of the gulled adults, Lisa Randazzo, William Jamieson, Joseph Tranhorn and Roger B. Miller are all on target.
The acting award must go to Kathy Umberger, who plays Ouisa Kitteridge. Well-matched with Burchette, she quietly holds attention and creates a rounded textured character throughout the show. At its close, she gives a speech of restrained power and condensed emotion that guarantees a hearty ovation for the play.
It might be wise to note that some rough language crops up as expletives and in descriptions of homosexual activities. This is not a play for children or for the easily offended, nor for those who want their dramas handed to them pre-digested. ILLUSTRATION: WHEN & WHERE
What: ``Six Degrees of Separation,'' by John Guare.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through
Feb. 17.
Where: Little Theatre of Virginia Beach, 24th Street and
Barberton Drive.
Tickets: 428-9233.
by CNB