Görsellikten Eyleme: John Guare’in Altı Derecelik Ayrılık Oyununda Ekfrasis İzleri

Abstract

John Guare’s renowned play Six Degrees of Separation (1990) exposes the protagonist Paul’s endeavour to assert his identity and find a place, by creating false identities, in the world of high-class individuals which is bounded by class, race, and sexual orientation. In delineating his journey into modern American culture, John Guare employs Kandinsky’s double-sided painting along with many other artistic devices such as flashbacks, flashforwards, cross-cutting, and different narrative techniques. Kandinsky’s painting, which dominates the stage with its slow movement, mirrors the varied aspects of social life where the characters hold no enduring and steady connection with reality. This painting also projects the emotional and psychological dilemma of the characters in the social life where they lose their sense of humanity and moral ideals. In this respect, this paper intends to explore how Kandinsky’s ideas of art and his double-sided painting constitute the quintessence of the play, reflecting the materialism of decadent contemporary society and its emotional and psychological impacts on the characters.