Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Andy Grainger as a couple whose lives are turned in a new direction in Six Degrees of Separation. Photo / Andi Crown Photographer
Auckland Theatre Company has found powerful contemporary relevance in its revival of a John Guare play which made a big splash at its 1990 Broadway premiere and quickly reappeared in a star-studded movie version featuring a youthful Will Smith.
In the 1990s, Six Degrees of Separation offered a sharp satire
on the shallowness of limousine liberalism but it delivers a far more disturbing message in an era that is demonstrating how compulsive dishonesty can create its own reality if it is practiced with sufficient vigour and shamelessness.
The play's elaborate layers of imaginative fabrication are founded in the true-life story of a black teenage street-hustler who insinuated himself into the fabulous world of Upper East Side socialites by pretending to be the son of Sydney Poitier.
Tane Williams-Accra, playing the conman at the heart of the story, blends ingratiating charm with vulnerability as he movingly expresses a young man's yearning to be someone other than himself.
Jennifer Ward-Lealand brings panache to the play's urbane irony and finds the emotional core of the story as she confronts the emptiness of an existence which has lost the ability to distinguish between real and fake.
