Word: genet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...American premiere of Jean Genet's one-act play Deathwatch brings together the four figures who probably constitute Harvard's top theatrical talent: director Stephen Aaron and actors Colgate Salsbury, Harold Scott,, and D.J. Sullivan. This fact alone would promise to make the production a memorable one, but the measure of its success exceeds all expectations. Deathwatch is superb...
...effectiveness of the production is all the more astounding because Genet's play poses some unique problems both for the actors and the audience. On first glance, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces mixed. Incident follows incident, but their relationship to each other seems indiscernible and nothing which might be called a story forms. Yet in time, and with the prodding of Aaron's perceptive direction, a pattern does emerge...
...Genet, who incidentally is not a professional writer but a criminal with a long prison record, can be seen as a profoundly moralistic thinker. His system, however, is an almost complete reversal of what is usually considered as morality. For him, the absolute goal of human existence is not the attainment of good, but of evil. This state cannot be reached by mere effort--it must, like Calvinistic grace, be conferred from without. Thus he represents Green Eyes' crime as not rationally motivated...
...Genet has had only one other play over produced in America-- The--Maids-- which was given off-Broadway last season. The author has spent most of his life in jail for thievery and was only saved from life imprisonment in 1948 upon the personal intervention of Andre Gide, Jean Paul Sartre, and Jean Cocteau. Sartre has been Genet's chief advocate, writing several essays about...
...jail experience is the background for Deathwatch, which deals with three prisoners in a death-cell. Stephen A. Aaron '57, who will direct the play, has said that Genet is interested in the inter-relations among the three; the pressures and the loneliness that they experience as each one tries desperately to express his own individuality...