Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare

Hey, everybody, so the play that I just got done reading for this week is "Six Degrees of Separation" by John. I found this to be an excellent play. I loved the way it was told like a story and how most of the actors broke the 4th wall and talked directly to the audience.

The story is about a young man named "Paul" who cons numerous families out of some money by making up a story about how his dad is a director and will making the musical "Cats" into a film. After the main couple that this happens to in the play finds Paul in bed with a hustler in the morning they get mad and kick him out of the house. They soon find out that this same thing has happened to numerous other families and they are soon talked to by a detective to find this "con man" so they can put him in jail. By the end of it, Ouisa, one of the people who gets conned finds herself bonded to the young man and convinces him to go to the police so that his punishment will be less severe. She as well as the readers realize that the young man is just a lonely kid who just really wants to be loved and to be a part of a family, and that is all he was really looking for through these cons. None of them just ever turned out the way he wanted them to turn out. He was just misunderstood and just really wanted to feel included.

And like I will look for with plays that I read here is a monologue I found in the book.

Paul:

"The imagination. That's our out. Our imagination teaches us our limits and then how to grow beyond those limits. The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril. The imagination is the noon voice that sees clearly and says yes, this is what I want for my life. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams that become your bedrock. If we don't listen to that voice, it dies. It shrivels. It vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to."