American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Sta ...

a center? For example, John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, which was presented in a single living room setting, is given no set description at all in the opening stage direction of the text. Only the two-sided Kandinsky painting that revolves above the stage is described. The movie version was acclaimed for using New York City as the setting—but the play does not do this. Instead, the play situates us in the Kittredges’ living room, the very space they use to keep the city out, the six degrees of separation from Otherness—race, economics, and homosexuality. Yet the Other does intrude into the play—indeed other narrators who live in those other parts of the city tell their story in the same setting. In the published script, Guare explains that he left the solution up to the director and designer:

This production solution illustrates several key points. The first is that the playwright abdicates the realist’s imperative to describe the setting down to the last detail. Indeed, in contrast to Beckett’s desire to control every production, Guare cedes all authority for the set to the production team.⁶ The solution they found allows the fluidity of movie-like intercutting of scenes and places to occur without pause, the audience’s imagination filling in the spaces. At the same time, the set is clearly simply a theatrical stage, not a real room. What is crucial to the play is that the setting both define the world of privilege and separation of the super-rich at the same time that it demonstrate that this space is not the center