Six Degrees of Separation

The imagination is an important theme in the play. When Paul pretends that Sidney Poitier is his father, he tells the audience that Poitier used to sit by the sea as a child and “conjure up the kind of worlds that were on the other side and what [he’d] do in them” (22-23). Like his supposed father, Paul uses the imagination to find “the exit from the maze of [his] nightmare” (63), believing that “the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world” (34) and something that allows you “to transform your nightmares into dreams” (63). He “imagines” himself as a rich, “preppy” (14) graduate and, later, “imagines” himself as almost a member of Ouisa’s family, all in an effort to find a family and make a better life for himself. For Paul, the imagination is a way of learning one’s “limits and then how to grow beyond those limits” (62) and, ultimately, not something external and alien but “the place we are all trying to get to” (63). Such is his commitment to this idea that his efforts to reach his imagined new life soon transcend socially-acceptable behavior, eventually leading to his arrest.