Word: genet
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...Blacks. The Harvard-Radcliffe Black CAST tackles Jean Genet's symbolic drama The Blacks--which uses racial hatred as a metaphor for the absurdity of modern society--with apparently mixed results. At the Loeb, April 14-17, at 8 p.m. Tickets...
...dancer Stephanie Virtue Secret-rose Diop--"Virtue" for short, which neatly sums up the situation. The curate Diouf pleads for passive religious acceptance; Felicity Trollop Pardon shrieks "Dahomey!" and "Africa!" with an epileptic frenzy; Augusta Snow says little and wears anger like a nimbus round her pout-mouthed head. Genet further burlesque's white perceptions of black names by dubbing the mysterious revolutionary "Newport News." Adelaide Bobo assists emcee-director Archibald and they begin to organize the evening's performance...
...nature of the characters and the trappings of their violence seem impossibly cliched, this is just what Genet intended. As Archibald explains...
...critic dubbed The Blacks "A white man's idea of Negroes' ideas of white ideas of Negroes." The enormous complexity of action and meaning renders Genet's play almost impossible to stage effectively, and even harder to comprehend at one sitting. Diverse audience interpretation stands as a testament not so much to the broad range of Genet's material as to its failure as pure theater. The current word on this literary-intellectual exercise maintains that The Blacks concerns not so much racial schism as the general violence and absurdity of the modern world. This theory nicely dilutes Genet...
...Noble matters" seems to mean anything that refuses to embrace black stereotype. Black CAST displayed "a great deal of courage" in choosing to stage a play whose very nature in a sense doomed it as theater; in Genet's The Blacks, "noble" intent qualifies a less than magnificent performance...