Stage

...Their children are classic clich6 brats, college-age parent-haters with no redeeming qualities...

...Vance's tour de force is Paul's analysis of The Catcher in the Rye as a protest against the loss of imagination in our society--a presentation that is itself an act of imagination...

...Two pairs of hands are examining the bloody damage...

...Costner looks at the surgical instruments laid out and guesses what is in store for him...

...s it happens, while Guare's animated carloons were moving their successful show from the small to the large theater at Lincoln Center, Shawn was touching another aspect of the lives of comfortable New Yorkers in The Fever, a monologue that played briefly at the Public Theater...

...It selects...

...The persona in The Fever, a character very like Wallace Shawn (and not simply because he is performing it), is in a "poor country where they do not speak my language," suffering from the titular fever...

...His presentation assumes that the audience shares his background and his anxiety...

...If the sequence has any purpose in the play (Guare's admirers love him for the absurdist jumps in his work), it is to indicate that Paul's charm and his lies can be fatal as well as funny...

...two voices agree that gangrene hasn't set in yet, that an operation is in order, but that a few reviving cups of coffee must be downed by the exhausted doctors before any cutting takes place...

...There is only the disease, the portrait of a man trapped by perceptions that pull him deeper and deeper into a disaffection with his own life while he tries desperately to hold on to the perquisites of his position...

...It will return to New York in the spring, after Shawn has performed it in England for a few months...

...At some point, Ouisa explains that she has read that everyone is connected with everyone else in the world with only six persons between you and whomever...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN A FILMMAKI R'S INSTINCTS COSTNER'S 'DANCES WITH WOLVES' he very first shot of Dances with Wolves announces what the rest of the film confu'ms: Kevin Cosmer has a filmmaker's eye...

...Whether or not that is an accurate description of the original victims, it is clearly a proper label for Guare's good-Samaritan suckers...

...His fever is not physical...

...There are occasional humorous lines and images and changes of voice (indicating sides of his character) to break the even flow of the monologue, but it is a demanding work passing itself off as a comfortable conversation...

...STAGE DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE 'SIX DEGREES' & 'FEVER' "~ y now presumably everyone---or everyone who _9 reads celebrity gossip columns--knows that '~ John Guare's SixDegrees of Separation is disD tantly based on events that took place in 1983...

...Between bouts of vomiting, he recalls, lovingly, his protected childhood, bemoans his affluence in the face of the world's poor, defends that affluence (sounding like Aunt Dan), and imagines retribution for the life he leads...

...It rejects...

...Very shallow people," was his answer...

...The pointof-view is from the opposite end of the table where the patient's unseen head rests...

...The courage that brought him medals was born of suicidal desperation...

...The conceit gives Guare his title, but ifI am going to play connection games, I prefer the network of interconnected minds that Wallace Shawn proffers in "On the Context of the Play," the essay accompanying the Grove Press edition of Aunt Dan and Lemon...

...The Fever's fever is societally induced anguish...

...Guare's theme is a solid one, but the play is as light as its mannerisms...

...The production consists of Shawn's sitting onstage alone and talking for almost two hours...

...A friend of mine tells me that during a recent television interview the young man was asked what his gullible hosts were like...

...It dramatizes...

...Unlike the characters in Six Degrees, he has the imagination to see people more clearly than his upbringing taught him he should...

...The success of Guare's play has turned the real con man--whose name happily escapes me--into a celebrity of sorts...

...Between the victim's feet, we can see in the distance a group of Union soldiers at rest...

...the courage born of compassion and premeditation makes him a traitor...

...it is metaphysical...

...We haven't once glimpsed their faces...

...My concerns are about the imagination and how we live in this city," Guare told the New York Times (June 10, 1990...

...That finely discriminatory visual sense that decided to render the surgical hands synecdochic rather than turn the doctors into conventionally photographed bit players, that reserved the first close-up of the movie for the hero who will appear in nearly every subsequent scene, that established his fear of amputation 18: Commonweal...

...and their guest, a liberal South African billionaire...

...A sentimental subplot emerges late in this very brief play when Paul, momentarily without prosperous gulls, meets a naive couple in the park--innocents from Utah or somewhere in the West who have come to conquer the city--and moves in with them, steals their money, and--offstage--seduces the young man, who discovers he likes sex with another man and promptly kills himself...

...There is no cure in The Fever...

...Yet, that is not where the seriousness in Six Degrees lies...

...Channing does a fine transition here, turning the ditzy dame of most of the play into a woman with the imagination to feel pain and distress...

...The next fifteen minutes of the film show the result of his decision to die rather than suffer amputation: his suicidal charge into enemy fire not only fails to bring about his death but saves his limbs and wins him military glory...

...The other too willing hosts include a foundation executive and a doctor, but their occupational levels are meaningless in a context which demands only that they be beguiled by the prospect of meeting a "moviestar" and appearing in a film version of Cats...

...The two characters who embody these concerns are Paul and Ouisa, the art dealer's wife, the only ones who escape stereotype and provide opportunities for the best performances in the production--those of Courtney B. Vance and Stockard Channing...

...Having enchanted the three of them, the fake Paul Poitier manages to lose his cozy nest when he is discovered in bed with a male hustler, a scene which establishes his homosexuality (useful later in the play) and allows a naked actor to run around the stage...

...That first shot, a lengthy one, is of wounded legs at one end of an operating table...

...First cut in the film: Reverse angle on the patient's face, Kevin Costner playing John Dunbar...

...Brief silence...

...Jerry Zaks, who directed the successful revival of that play at Lincoln Center in 1986, is again bringing his hard-punching style to Guare, but this time the result is noisy nervousness...

...A grunt, a moan, a rustling as the patient raises himself...

...I don't think there has been a character like that since the soldier who blew out his brains in James Jones's From 11January1991:17 Here to Eternity back in 1951...

...amiably attractive, it is finally as slickly trivial as most of its characters...

...She attempts and fails to save him, but what she is trying to save is the perception, planted by him, of the hole at the center of their lives...

...Much of the action of the play takes place offstage and is announced to the audience or to other characters...

...It is his inability to keep those others, those accusers, at bay...

...The two surgeons go off for their coffee...

...One review that I read suggested that The Fever is a dated Marxist critique, but the reviewer simplified in a way that Shawn, who has one of the most fascinating minds in contemporary American drama, never could...

...1 a teen-ager, passing himself off as Sidney Poitier's son, imposed on several affluent New Yorkers, pretending to be a friend or classmate of their children, cleanedout by a mugger and in need of temporary shelter...

...Caricature is central to Guare's most successful work--The House of Blue Leaves, for instance--so it is not surprising that the characters in Six Degrees are broadly comic figures, made the more obvious by the presidential style, the fragmentation that never allows them the space or the time to develop...

...his wife, who has a talent for non sequitur...

...The one deception that we witness involves an art dealer, more concerned with the deal than the art...

...The trick is to discover the six...

...When Paul calls Ouisa at the end, he may still be playing his lying games, but the desperation in his voice reaches her...

...It is never going to reach the large audience that has made Six Degrees of Separation a hit, but I was happier--which is to say, more uncomfortable--with Shawn than with Guare...

...The remaining two hours and forty-five minutes of Dances with Wolves show the consequence of a different brand of courage: during his one-man occupation of a far-flung western outpost in Sioux territory soon after the war, Costner's decision to fight on behalf of the natives leads him to reject the goals of his government and his caste...

...Much of this is intended as an abrasive joke, of course, and there are funny lines, but the play lacks the inspired kookiness of the best of Blue Leaves...