Six Degrees of Separation

Near the end of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, Ouisa Kittredge asks he husband Flan, “But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?” (118). She is referring to the experience she and Flan had with Paul, a young black male who entered their lives by pretending to be the son of Sidney Portier. Ouisa does not want the experience to become just another anecdote in her and Paul’s upper crust socially elite circle. She has realized that people are only ever separated to other people in life by six people, and, fancying themselves as liberals the Kittredges felt they were connecting with a form of humanity which their socially insulated life prevents them from regularly experiencing. Flan tells Ouisa the question she asks is a problem that artist’s have dealt with for centuries, the problems of “color” and “structure.” Color appears to represent a metaphor for “perception” and structure serves as a metaphor for “identity” and personal development. As Ouisa says she is only a “collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes” (118). In other words, in life we perceive others as our senses and experiences allow us to perceive them. For example, Quisa and Flan are readily taken in by Paul’s story when they meet him because it also offers them a chance for a part in the movie version of Cats and the opportunity to meet and work with Sidney Portier. In a similar way, their friends rea

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Approximate Word count = 1134
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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