Stockard Channing’s ‘New Puppy’

When Stockard Channing received the call to join the cast of “Six Degrees of Separation,� she had just finished starring in the pre-Broadway engagement of “Jake’s Women,� the first Neil Simon play to close out of town. About the last thing she wanted to do was jump into another play.

Yet Blythe Danner, who had originally been cast in the pivotal role of Ouisa in “Six Degrees,� had just quit the production and a replacement was desperately needed. Though playwright John Guare was an old friend--Channing had starred in the successful revival of his “House of Blue Leaves�--she says she wasn’t interested in “ . . . just doing a favor. I wanted to see if I could make some kind of contribution.�

The positive critical response to both the production and its star point to a sizable contribution. Creating a funny and wistful portrait of a woman drowning in the minutiae of a frivolous and cosseted existence, Channing avoids the pitfall of caricature endemic to presenting the silly rich on stage. She manages to develop a fully fleshed-out character who moves from despair to resolution in a play awash with the abstract.

As someone who grew up on Park Avenue and went to “the right schools,� Channing recognized Ouisa as “a certain kind of woman living a certain kind of life in New York. The sort of woman Tom Wolfe might write about, the social X-ray. I didn’t want to turn my back on that kind of specific behavior, because that was part of the richness of the play. You just take the edge off so that one hopes she’s not alienating.�

“Jake’s Women,� Channing says, left her with a “strange kind of exhilaration.

“I thought I had shot my wad trying to make that play work,� she says, “but I was grateful because it left me in shape to go directly into this play. The only way that I can describe it is the feeling you get when you see your puppy hit by a car and you’re handed a new one the next day. Later it turns out to be the best thing that could’ve happened--not that the puppy was hit by a car--but that you were given another one.

“That sort of trivializes an experience that was really a weird emotional fusion among the cast,� she adds. “We all had this understanding to just surrender to the work. We had no idea the sort of emotional reverberations it would create.�

Channing leaves “Six Degrees� in mid-August to film Arthur Hiller’s “Married to It,� a story of contemporary married life with Jeff Bridges. But she plans to return to the role of Ouisa this fall when “Six Degrees of Separation� moves to Broadway.