Hampton, who had studied acting at SUNY Buffalo (when he showed up to class: He wasn’t always there), ran into tough times in New York City. “David Hampton arrived in New York City in 1981 set on pursuing an acting and dancing career,” according to one obituary. He came to New York, hoping to make it big. ”All I could tell him was to stop doing these things.”ĭAVID HAMPTON fascinated people with his stories and inspired a Broadway play, but never reaped the rewards.ĭavid Hampton was born in Buffalo on Apand died at age 39 on July 18, 2003. ”He would often call me for advice,” Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who represented Hampton when Guare sued him for harassment, told The New York Times. One’s reward was income and recognition, while the other’s was incarceration and a steady stream of efforts to reinvent himself through new roles in life. Hampton tried hard to benefit from the story he had created, but never succeeded, creating new characters and cons long after the play debuted. The other inspired the show, but lived a life more aptly titled Six Degrees of Incarceration. The other was someone who reinvented himself again and again, often with tragic consequences, a fraudster, a fabulist or even an actor who used the world as his stage, creating characters that, in the end, were cons. One is a playwright able to transform experience into entertainment. The Broadway revival may make it appropriate to look back at Hampton as well as to Guare. But it’s unlikely they know much about Hampton’s life beyond the way it’s been adapted and altered for the play – and what happened after the show debuted.

Some may even know that it was inspired by the true story of David Hampton. The thousands of people streaming in to see John Guare’s play on Broadway these days may enjoy the show, the acting, the writing and the production. And from another point of view, the claim that he was in the show was fiction – something in which David Hampton, like John Guare, specialized. To an extent, he was all over John Guare’s famous play.

New York Magazine later reported that David Hampton, the man whose life inspired Six Degrees of Separation, was going around, telling people that he was “in” the show.

It was true or a lie, depending on your point of view. More specifically, he said he was in Six Degrees of Separation. One night at a club many years ago, I met someone who told me he was appearing in a big play.

Movie six degrees of separation