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(like the Kandinsky hanging on the wall) In short, he plays them and the South African guest like a violin. In the ensuing panic, he claims to know the couple’s two children and various details about the family and their apartment. even Princess Diana visited Nelson Mandela in jail on Robben Island)Īs they plot and explain to the audience that they really are NOT taking advantage of the friendship, while at the same time getting excited about pulling off the deal, the doorman brings in an attractive young African American, Paul, who appears to have just been stabbed, mugged and “divested” of his wallet and briefcase with his Harvard thesis etc. In other words Flan is directly helping to prop up the South African economy and apartheid, at a time when every right thinking person and institution was trying to dismantle it N.B. Flan and Ouisa Kitteridge were busy getting ready to take, Geoffry, a South African “friend/business acquaintance,” (who just happens to be the owner of extensive gold mines with 70,000 employees) out to dinner hoping that he will put up $2 million (a lot of money in those days.) so that Flan, a high-end art dealer, can buy a Cézanne and re-sell it to the Japanese, thereby making a tidy profit for both of them. The couple, then re-enact what had happened to make them upset. Also it allowed the actors to connect intimately with the whole audience, rather than just the front row, as would have happened, had the play been performed on a proscenium stage. It was a brilliant way to differentiate which spoken words were inner monologues and which were directed at the other characters. The characters voiced their inner monologues directly to the audience from the outer circle. In this scene, as in others, they voice their inner monologues to the audience in between re-enacting the “scenes”.Ĭharles Waxberg had a stroke of genius because he chose to stage this play in the round the actual “action” when the characters interacted with each other was done in a small inner circle in the middle of a larger circle. John Guare opens the play as an upper-East side dwelling Manhattan couple, are having a hissy fit because they have been the “victims” of an African American con-man. Thus there is an important historical context as the play opens. However, as a result of certain geological factors, like having the world’s deepest mines, extracting gold in South Africa is much more labor intensive and costly than elsewhere, so that the only way it had ever been profitable was to ruthlessly exploit thousands of Native Africans, in horrendously unsafe conditions. From ancient times to 1989, the South African mines produced more than 40% of all the gold that had ever been mined, in the world. The mining of diamonds and gold had made South Africa the country that it is. Even industries such as wine, which were not the most exploitive of the native African majority, were boycotted, but the gold industry was something else entirely. In those days, it really was not considered morally acceptable for anybody to do business with South Africa, at all. Blessedly, it did not happen that way, but in 1990, and as the play opened, no one at the time knew that. the perception was that the minority White South Africans, led by the Afrikaaner Nationalists, were so intransigent, that it would only lead to a very nasty civil war, immense bloodshed and the expulsion of all the whites from South Africa. to end apartheid.įor example, the U.S.’s first African-American president, Barak Obama, got his start in politics at Occidental College through his involvement in this movement. by governments, charities, churches, institutions, individuals and especially universities to “divest” of any and all South African investments, in order to put external pressure on the government of S.A. Through-out the 1980’s there had been movements all over the world, particularly in the U.K. On February 11 of that year, Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress (ANC) and future president of South Africa was released after 27 years in prison, by S.A. The play opened off-Broadway in 1990, a year so significant, it hardly needs elaboration.
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A whole library could be filled with discussions about the psychological issues, the class conflict and now since it is almost 30 years after it was written, the historical background.
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A Late 20th Century Political Morality TaleĪlthough Charles Waxberg, Artistic Director of Theatre 9/12, always presents thought-provoking plays, enhanced by his inspirational direction and staging, his production of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, was by far the most stimulating play I have seen there.