STAGE REVIEW : ‘Six Degrees’ Really Strikes Home : Drama: A brittle staging of John Guare’s play at the Doolittle takes aim at mindless ‘beautiful’ people.

The key to John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” which launches the Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre 1992-93 season at the Doolittle in Hollywood, lies in that spinning Kandinsky painting that hovers over Tony Walton’s stark set: a deep maroon disk, topped by two couches and the outline of gilt doorways.

The Kandinsky begins and ends the play, its silent, revolving frame exhibiting one truth and then another with the inexorable timing of another planet in juxtaposition to our own. It serves overtly to symbolize Guare’s message.

And there is a significant one in “Six Degrees”--those six levels of separation that suggest the fragility, closeness and impossible distance that connect us to each other. In the true story of a young impostor who, posing as Sidney Poitier’s son, insinuated himself into the lives of affluent Manhattanites, Guare found the metaphor for his 1990 play, which has taken two years too long to reach us.

“Six Degrees” strikes home on any number of levels. Not only are Ouisa (Marlo Thomas) and her art-dealer husband Flan (John Cunningham) fair game and fairly mindless “beautiful” people who define their lives with success and money in the narrowest terms, but their modus vivendi breeds inadvertently funny dialogue. Ouisa and Flan’s justification for courting a white South African friend (Sam Stoneburner) who “might not have the price of a dinner” but who “easily” might have the $2 million Flan needs to purchase a Cezanne, provokes a hilarious series of crass admissions of mercenary intent.

It’s a flippancy that lays the groundwork for Paul’s intrusion. This Ivy Leaguish young African-American (Ntare Mwine), who claims to be Poitier’s son and a college pal of Ouisa and Flan’s children, is welcomed by them after a so-called stabbing incident lands him on their doorstep.

Paul is suave. Paul is seductive. Paul cooks for them. Paul is good at massaging their egos. He has impeccable manners and an impeccable pedigree. And he can bamboozle his hosts into hearing about his thesis (stolen, he claims, along with his wallet by his “assailant”).

The thesis revolves in mesmerizing terms around the death of the imagination as exemplified by “Catcher in the Rye,” with Holden Caulfield as victim and agent provocateur . “Hates all phoniness, only lies to others. . . . What is schizophrenia,” asks Paul, “but a horrifying state where what’s in here doesn’t match up with what’s out there?”

Play within a play.

Paul’s deception is uncovered by his hosts sooner than expected, and “Six Degrees” becomes what it is really meant to be: an examination of reality and its fiction.

The premise is richly overlaid with the humor and ironies Guare has concocted, not the least of which involves the arrival of the couple’s obnoxious, parent-loathing teen-agers--not just Ouisa and Flan’s, but those of their friends Kitty (Holly Barron) and Larkin (Philip LeStrange), and especially Dr. Fine (Victor Raider-Wexler), all of whom have been similarly victimized by Paul.

There is a perilous element of cartoon in that mob of spoiled brats, as there can be in their parents, who take on a nerdiness when assaulted by the nasty but not entirely unwarranted verbal volleys of their offspring.

It is a tendency that must be fought by the actors, particularly the one playing Ouisa, if the play is to successfully pursue its intent, which is to explore what Guare calls “the tensions that discolor life” and the elusive duality of truth and its shadow.

Like it or not, Ouisa has been changed by Paul. They have developed a moral connection that has caused him to reach out to her in real if somewhat abstracted need, and caused her to recognize its validity.

Paul’s schizoid behavior results in a separate tragedy for a pair of earnest and relatively destitute young people (nicely performed by Patrick Fabian and Deirdre Lovejoy) that plunges “Six Degrees” into its final spin. No matter how ill-equipped she may be for the job, Ouisa’s concluding speeches are anguished attempts to redress the skewed values in her life.

Her transformation is crucial to the play’s ability to touch us and is what made Stockard Channing’s performance at Lincoln Center ultimately so compelling. Thomas goes only for the brittleness in Ouisa, which works superficially in the play’s early, lighter scenes. But she’s out of her depth in the final ones, settling for line-readings when we should feel emotion.

This reticence is reflected in a lack of chemistry with Mwine’s fast-talking but equally glib Paul, though it’s impossible to tell which actor might have influenced which. Since the balance of the company takes its cue from that relationship, the result, despite Jerry Zaks’ direction, is a distancing tone that may lessen as the company settles more comfortably into the run.

For the time being, however, it diminishes the impact of a play that remains Guare’s most intricate and startling achievement--not only for what it cleverly spells out, but in many ways for what it leaves to our own power of imagination, that “linchpin of our existence,” whose death Guare mourns in a work of such vigorous imagining that it rebukes and upsets his contention.

* “Six Degrees of Separation,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Exceptions: Sunday, Oct. 25, Nov. 1 and 8, 7 p.m.; Nov. 12, 19, Dec. 3, 10 and 17, 2 p.m. Also Nov. 23, Dec. 21, 8 p.m.; Nov. 27, Dec. 23, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 27. $33-$39; (213) 972-7372.