Word: genet
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...perfectly average man going a bit mad is now a stock character, taken for granted. Similarly, one no longer bothers to speak of the theater of the absurd as if it were an exotic fringe entity. The achievement of the Madness Revolution has been to make Beckett, Ionesco and Genet seem oldfashioned...
Abbie Hoffman, who had ample opportunity for observation, has concluded that "everyone in prison is writing something." Indeed, there is a tradition of prisoner-authors from John Bunyan and O. Henry to Nehru and Genet. Most of the current ones, including Eldridge Cleaver, the Berrigan brothers and Hoffman himself, have used prison time to work out polemical theories. A few, though, are nonpolitical convicts who are trying to write about what they know best-crime. By far the most skillful is E. (for Emil) Richard Johnson, inmate No. 22251 at Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison, now 34 and doing...
...Screens, however, lacks the caste v. outcast tensions of The Blacks and the musky eroticism of The Balcony. In a Genetic mutation of Bertolt Brecht, the playwright doubly fails. He tries to apply the epical veneer of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the theme of little people whipped about in a historical convulsion, in this case France's punitive struggle with Algeria. Brecht succeeded because he had a certain sympathy for the last-ditch valor of his little people even when he portrayed them as cagey sneaks. Genet fails because he regards all people as maggots...
...steals in order to be with him, and after that they sink from degradation to degradation. The war quickly takes center stage, with the French soldiers presented as dandified homosexuals and the rebels as little better. The language of the play is unrelentingly anal. As no great surprise, Genet finally advocates acts of evil as the only liberating force either against the old order...
Such sentiments do not lend themselves to poetic eloquence. There is one performance of shining distinction, that of Despo (stage name of Greek Actress Despo Diamantidou) as a revolutionary virago. She possesses an implacable authority that would make a top sergeant blench. With Despo in command, Genet's war might have ended in five minutes rather than five hours...