Paul has been stabbed by a mugger, it appear. Paul arrives in a comme il faut navy blazer and somewhat less presentable shirt, as it is wet with blood. In this uncannily empathetic satire from 1990, well-heel couple on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Flan Kittredge, art dealer, and his wife, Ouisa, come to realize just how tenuous their foothold on good life is, when Paul stumbles into their world one night. Mind you, one of the points of Six Degrees is that everybody feels like an outsider, including those in VIP rooms. Guares work ravenously aspirational outsiders in a culture that worships wealth and celebrity. With this production, directed by Trip Cullman, Paul takes his place more fully as one of the great pretenders, or less-than-great Gatsbys, who populate Mr. Hawkins transforms a fatally mixed-up character into something close to a tragic hero. This is because Paul Poitier has been embodied with tremulous, searching sensitivity by screen actor Corey Hawkins in an earthbound revival of John Guares ' marvelous Six Degrees of Separation, which opens on Tuesday night at Ethel Barrymore Theater, with estimable Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey as Pauls plump society pigeons.
But there is no doubt that he has grown in stature and, in a paradoxical way, truthfulness. All right, perhaps not grow up, since we were still talking about narcissistic con artist of adolescent fecklessness and zero self-knowledge.
That dangerous young man who calls himself Paul Poitier has grown up in the 27 years since he first set foot on the New York stage.