Weales presents a detailed summary of the Six Degrees of Separation and also comments on the differences found between the characters.

By now presumably everyone-or everyone who reads celebrity gossip columns-knows that John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation is distantly based on events that took place in 1983; 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, cleaned-out by a mugger and in need of temporary shelter. The success of Guare's play has turned the real con man-whose name happily escapes me-into a celebrity of sorts. A friend of mine tells me that during a recent television interview the young man was asked what his gullible hosts were like. "Very shallow people,"_ was his answer. Whether or not that is an accurate description of the original victims, it is clearly a proper...