Guare has based his piercing play on a true story from the early ’80s. The figure of the con artist has fascinated American writers from Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man” to David Mamet’s film “House of Games.” In Melville’s novel, a savage satire on American moral complacency, the confidence man assumes several shapes, including that of a poor black man. Melville was making a statement about pre-Civil War America. Guare is talking about race and other disconnections that sunder the city in 1990.
Since this is John Guare (“The House of Blue Leaves,” “Bosoms and Neglect”) the play takes off on a careening ride from disorienting comedy into unexpected pathos and tragedy. Even greater than the gulf of misunderstanding that separates white from black is the gap across which parents and children regard one another with appallingly hilarious hostility. A daughter threatens her parents with an elopement to Afghanistan; a son goes bananas when his parents give a favorite shirt (it showed off his “new body”) to Paul. What at first seem like the scary but bloodless crimes of a clever hustler take on darker aspects that lead to the suicide of one of Paul’s young dupes.
Perverted potential Paul is a major creation: he’s a figure of dizzying ambiguity, weirdly innocent, sexually seductive, socially unsophisticated, startlingly insightful. In an impassioned speech he talks of the death of the imagination, that faculty which, he says, is “God’s gift to make the act of self examination bearable.” Guare (and McDaniel) make every shift of Paul’s sensibility believable and disturbing. It’s as if this apparition from the shadows embodies all the fragmented potential that his privileged victims have perverted. Flan, for example, has real insight into the nature of creativity, but his energies are directed to big scores in the madly inflated art market.
It’s Ouisa who’s awakened by the amoral Paul to the emptiness of life in the fast lane to nowhere. “He did more for us in a few hours than our children ever did,” she says wonderingly to Flan. Stockard Channing’s performance is the peak achievement of director Jerry Zaks’s fine 17-actor ensemble at New York’s Lincoln Center. Channing has become a superb American stage actress. It’s doubtful that anyone else could move so inexorably and affectingly from ditsy comedy to transcendent radiance.
