Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Posted by Bruce Miller

In response to a recent blog entry (Summer Stock Memories - Part II [Aug 19]), a curious reader commented as follows: “I don’t mean to be dumb, but what the heck is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” The question, of course, is not dumb at all.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a game. I understand it’s now even a board game. I've never seen the board game, but the photo to the right and above, found on the internet, seems to indicate that a board game version does indeed exist.

For years it was a boardless trivia game, inspired by the career of the talented actor, Kevin Bacon, pictured to the left. It required no equipment other than a knowledge of and interest in theatre and film.

The game was originally inspired, I believe, by the brilliant John Guare play, Six Degrees of Separation, which was itself inspired by the interconnectedness theories espoused by the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, and the subsequent "small world" research conducted by Harvard-based American social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in the late 60s and early 70s.

The basic idea is that everyone in the world is interconnected. If you are separated from your friend by one degree, then you are separated from your friend’s friends by two degrees. Milgram’s research suggests that when we extend this theory forward to six degrees, everyone in the world is connected to everyone else—and by a fairly short chain.

John Guare’s play is a funny, thought provoking and deeply moving examination of what this means when we look at our daily lives and social responsibilities. It’s one of my two or three favorite plays in the world. If The Little Dog Laughed works well on the 2007-2008 Signature Season at Barksdale Willow Lawn, expect to see Six Degrees of Separation appearing in a forthcoming seaon not too far down the road.

Anyway, back to Kevin Bacon. Inspired by these same theories, the game depends on the belief that every actor in the world can be connected to every other actor in the world by a chain of cast mates. The object of the game is to discover the closest connections in the shortest amount of time.

Let me give you an example: I recently mentioned Charlie Dacus, the child actor who just appeared in Bye Bye Birdie at Dogwood Dell. Can we link him to Sir Laurence Olivier, the “greatest English-speaking actor of the 20th Century”?

After about 5 minutes, here’s the chain I discovered. Charlie Dacus was in Theatre IV’s The Wizard of Oz with Jan Guarino (one degree). Jan Guarino was in Swift Creek’s Once Upon a Mattress with Phil Whiteway (two degrees). Phil Whiteway was in Theatre IV’s West Side Story with Blair Underwood (three degrees). Blair Underwood was in L A Law with Jill Eikenberry (four degrees). Jill Eikenberry was in Arthur with Sir John Gielgud (five degrees). Sir John was in Richard III with Sir Laurence Olivier (six degrees).
And yes, I have noticed that Kevin Bacon appears nowhere in the chain noted above. But he doesn’t have to, at least the way I’ve always played the game. The game is called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon simply because, as college kids were inventing and playing the game in the 90s, Kevin Bacon’s name kept coming up because he tends to have been in lots of movies with lots of diverse actors, including his wife Kyra Sedgwick. That's Kevin and Kyra in the photo to the right.

While at the University of Virginia, a grad student named Brett Tjaden created the Oracle of Bacon website and computer program to determine if Kevin Bacon was, in fact, the Center of the Hollywood Universe. Tjaden entered data for the 800,000 plus actors listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to see which actors had the closest connections to the largest number of other actors. He determined that whereas Kevin Bacon was in fact in the top 1% of all film actors in terms of his close connections to all other film actors, he was beat out by Rod Steiger (pictured to the left), Dennis Hopper and Donald Sutherland for the top three spots.

Some people play the game by giving each actor a Bacon Number. If you are Kevin Bacon himself, your Bacon Number is 0. If you have appeared in a cast with Kevin Bacon himself, your Bacon Number is 1. If you have appeared in a cast with someone who has a Bacon Number of 1, then your Bacon Number is 2.

Richmond All-Star Robyn O’Neill (pictured to the right with Pat Carroll) has a Bacon Number of 3. You can read her comment to my previous blog post (Summer Stock Memories – Part II [Aug 19]) to count the connections. The only Richmond actors who I know have a Bacon Number of 2 are John Glenn, Pat Carroll, Sam Wells and Kelly Scallion. John (pictured to the left in The Man Who Came to Dinner at Company of Fools) works in Idaho with Demi Moore, Pat was in E. R. with Noah Wyle, and Sam and Kelly were in Miss Rose White with Kyra Sedgwick. Demi and Noah were in A Few Good Men with Kevin, and Kyra is married to Kevin and appeared with him in Murder in the First. So, if you’re a Richmond actor and you’ve appeared with John, Pat, Sam or Kelly, you also have a Bacon Number of 3.

To a certain extent, my wife and daughter, set designer Terrie Powers and Hannah Miller, have you all beat. When Miss Rose White was filming in Richmond, Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and their child (children?) all lived in a rented home by Byrd Park. When Hannah was a baby, Terrie used to take her to the Byrd Park playground. One evening Terrie came home very excited, because she and Hannah had just spent the entire afternoon playing in a Byrd Park sandbox with Kevin Bacon and his son. Terrie was a huge Kevin Bacon fan, but just like I had done years before with Arthur Miller, she never let on that she knew who he was. So they sat there for a couple hours playing and talking as two parents. If she’d done the “fan thing,” he probably would have left.

All reports are that Mr. Bacon himself is not particularly into the celebrity game. When interviewed about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, he good-heartedly replied, "I felt as if I was the brunt of some massive joke at my expense: 'Can you believe this loser can be connected to Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn?'"

A "loser" he certainly is not.

On a final note, if you’re a fan of The Closer starring Kyra Sedgwick (and if you aren’t, you should be), you’ll know that Kyra’s dad is now being played by Barry Corbin (pictured below and to the right), who was with us here in Richmond as a special guest star last October for Virginia Arts & Letters Live at the Empire. So if you performed in that iteration of VALL, your Bacon Number is now a 3.

All those who want to accept the challenge of discovering the other Richmond actors with Bacon Numbers of 2—I know there must be some—please do so in a comment to this blog.

--Bruce Miller

Summer Stock Memories - Part II

Posted by Bruce Miller
A kind commenter to a previous blog entry (My Lunch with Arthur Miller, August 12) inquired about the other actors who worked with me at Southbury Summer Playhouse. I don't know what happened to all or even most of them, but at least two of them were very talented and very successful. One of those two was a great friend of mine, so I’m eager to introduce him to you.

But let me mention first the one I didn’t know very well. He is the more “famous” of the two. Philip Anglim—some of you will know his name instantly—came in and out of Southbury during the summers while he was a student at Yale. A few years after Southbury, Philip went on to originate the role of John Merrick, The Elephant Man, both on Broadway and television, earning Tony and Emmy nominations for Best Actor. He later played the title role in MacBeth at Lincoln Center, and co-starred in the television mini-series The Thorn Birds. More recently, he created a very popular character on one of the Star Trek series.

My Southbury roommate, whom I obviously knew very well, was about ten years older than me. His name was Michael Connolly, and I thought he was a prince among men. I kept in touch with Michael up until his death in the late 80s. When Terry Burgler was Artistic Director of Allentown Playhouse after leaving TheatreVirginia, he hired Michael to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and I went up to see him in the show. It was our last chance to be together.

When I lived with Michael, he was already very successful in regional theatres. About six years after our summer at Southbury, he finally had his break on Broadway. In 1977, Michael appeared in the original Broadway production of Otherwise Engaged, directed by none other than Harold Pinter. Michael followed that success with a flop, 1979’s Break a Leg, in which he had the chance to play opposite the incomparable Julie Harris, under the direction of Charles Nelson Reilly.

Michael’s next Broadway gig was in 1980. It was Tennessee Williams’ last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, and Michael was cast opposite Geraldine Page under the direction of Jose Quintero. You can refer back to my earlier post (When Off Broadway Began, Barksdale was There, August 5) if you want to learn more about the history-making Williams / Quintero / Page triumvirate.

Sadly, Clothes was not a success, and Michael told me that Tennessee Williams was absolutely devastated by its failure. The moral of that story for Michael was, no matter how successful you are, it’s never successful enough.

His final Broadway years were good to Michael. As soon as Clothes closed, he was cast in the musical Copperfield, along with Richmond’s own Spence Ford. Copperfield provided employment throughout 1981, and as soon as it closed, Michael was cast as the first and only replacement in the role of “Venticelli” in Peter Shaffer’s smash hit Amadeus, under the direction of the legendary Peter Hall. Michael remained steadily employed with that show from late 1981 until 1983.

Amadeus was to be Michael’s last Broadway show. Throughout the rest of his life, he worked strictly in regional theatres until his declining health made that no longer possible. He died when he was about 50 years old.

People often ask me--shoot, I often ask myself--why I never sought to build a career in NYC. My mother was a native New Yorker, so the city never intimidated me. It's always felt like a second home. But I know that it was during my summer in Southbury that I decided to come back home to Richmond, and I think the main influence on that decision was my friend Michael Connolly. He was SO talented, and really successful, and yet he always lived from one job to the next, racked with insecurity. By allowing me to witness not only his success but also his emotional ups and downs, Michael helped me decide that what I really wanted was to have a fulltime job back home. I actually made the decision in the 12-hour car ride home at the end of the summer of '71. I've never regretted the decision, and never looked back.

The value of relating these “who worked with whom” actor stories, I think, is to let artists who are relatively new to this crazy career begin to feel how interconnected the national theatre community really is. The longer you’re in the business, the more you realize that it is a small world after all. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? In my experience, it’s more like three or four.

--Bruce Miller