Word: genet
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...Balcony. The first brothel was a temple. In antiquity the Mother Goddess was worshiped in the person of the sacred prostitute. Today the idea of erotic relations between heaven and earth persists in the fantasies of a frightening Frenchman named Jean Genet, an abandoned child who became successively a thief, a prostitute, a convict, and the most ferociously brilliant poet now at work in the French theater of the absurd. In The Balcony, a drama that resembles both a burlesque show and a Black Mass. Genet expounds his fantasies in a monstrous metaphor: the world is a vast brothel operated...
...instance a gasman dresses up like an archbishop and makes one of the girls confess to him. Genet's idea is that the real archbishop, and other powerful men, are powerful only because other men imitate them in their fantasy lives. As the play continues, the masquerade gets more complicated. The pretenders become the men they have imitated, and their new power, in turn, depends on others who will imitate them. Mirror imagery and masquerade pervade every scene. There are no highpoints and no development; and the play never really ends, because the mirrors go on reflecting the same pattern...
During the first three scenes, Genet doesn't repeat himself enough to spoil his gamy jokes. If you aren't too squeamish, you will laugh when the Executioner (Frederick Q. Rice) reaches under the Whore-thief's dress and claims to have found a flashlight, bearskins and several pairs of socks in her "notorious Kangaroo pocket." If that kind of thing bothers you, stay home. There's plenty of it all the way through...
...great many other people appear in one scene only, at the headquarters of a revolutionary cell. The scene itself is slow and partially irrelevant to the whole play; Genet changed it radically for the second French edition. Nevertheless, William Hart is very repellent (as he should be) as Armand, the Hood. But Marcus Powell (Roger the Plumber) speaks as if he memorized words by rote from a foreign language...
Still, Stotter and his cast have given Genet more than his due. It is a shame they chose this play...