Separated

Six Degrees of Separation (1993) was a disappointment. Partly I didn't like what was excessive talkiness--that's part of the problem of a stage play. But I couldn't relate very well to the characters. And as far as I was concerned, the supposedly hilariously fatuous daydreams of Upper East Side types weren't that hilarious, and no more fatuous than other peoples' daydreams. As Rita Kempley wrote:

It's too clever by half, an inside joke aimed at the New York gentry. The title is meant to suggest that everyone on the planet is linked to everyone else by a chain of acquaintances no more than six people long -- a notion plausible only to a socialite living on the Upper East Side.

A couple of things annoyed me:

• Even after having made 10 million dollars, without having invested any of their own money, because they didn't have enough, they still didn't feel rich. (They had to do several other deals before they were.)
• When Channing's character asked her husband, "Can you account for your life?" Of course she means having done something meaningful, but his material success looked impressive to me.

Another problem with authorial voice, I guess. I was better able to relate to Stockard Channing's character in The Business of Strangers, which was in many ways similar, with its play-acting. Or The Anniversary Party, with far more sympathetic characters.