Word: genet
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Director Phil Stotter and his generally competent cast struggled long and hard to make a success of things, and, in Jean Genet's terms, I suppose they did. But Genet's terms exclude most of what you and I respond to in the theater. The Balcony has no story in the normal sense and no real motivation for its characters. It does have a gimmick, a wonderful gimmick that Genet uses again and again, like a ritual. He leads us on an aimless trek down a hall of mirrors...
...Blacks, by Jean Genet. Unsentimental in attitude, ritualistic in form, poetic in language, this unconventional play is a remarkable work of art on the color question...
Most of these plays are comedies of horrors, but all of them, in strange and curious ways, beat with a quivering sense of present-day life. The wave of off-Broadway excitement and support for such playwrights as Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape) and Genet (The Balcony) made possible the precarious on-Broadway beachheads of Pinter (The Caretaker) and Ionesco (Rhinoceros). Genet, who is less an absurdist than a perversely erotic symbolist poet of the theater, is a perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well...
Three pieces at the end are about the "cultural and intellectual community" of the Atlantic countries. Of these, David Cole's on Odets, Genet and Osborne is alone a joy to read for its reflections on how these playwrights manhandle their audiences. George Collier has written an extremely intelligent and learned article on the anthropological methods of France, England, and America which after three readings still leaves me, if instructed, cold; it may bring something to others. Drew de Shong has a weird little rapid-fire glance at three avant-garde sculptors, a lollipop he lets us lick just once...
Having recently reached its 500th performance, Jean Genet's audacious, exotic and unsentimental dramatization of the color question, The Blacks, still has zest and impact...