Word: genet
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Angel Baby (Madera; Allied Artists) is a Bible Belter that brings to the movies Salome Jens, whose performance as the range "whorse" in Jean Genet's Balcony captivated New York's off Broadway last season. Now there is reason to believe that her seductive hallelujahs as a prurient evangelist may well make her the toast of the movie tabernacles. For Salome (she pronounces it Sal-o-way) is that rare actress whose vernal essence comes from within, breathing innocence, poignancy and a strange soft beauty into an otherwise wooden face...
...Blacks (translated from the French of Jean Genet by Bernard Frechtman) finds the most trenchant of French avant-gardists once more leading his own fierce assault on his own unyielding terms. Avantgarde, with Genet, is in part millenniums-old ancien regime. His originality rests on the very origins of theater, on ritual and ceremony, magic and masks; his modernity lies in how he reshapes, distorts, sophisticates, extends hem. Of all this The Blacks-a white nan's often extraordinary venture into Negro fantasy and psychology-is strong-y compacted...
...this kaleidoscopic use of attitudes that Genet substitutes for action; and it is his shifting, jarring, distorting, disrupting color effects that constitute his theatrical thrusts. What most flares and flashes is a scathing, mocking Negro anger toward the whites. Where in Genet's The Balcony men act out their dreams, in The Blacks they act out their nightmares as well. Often unbridled, sacrilegious, obscene, The Blacks is echoing too at times, with travestied ceremonies, Pirandellian illusion and reality, a sense of secular Black Masses and King Lear mock trials. A savage Negro assault that is also a Genet indictment...
...truly provocative work well staged by Gene Frankel, The Blacks can be poetic, caustic, slapstick, can startle, puzzle, perturb. And Genet, in going back to the ritual origins of theater as a way of going beyond its modern routine conventions, achieves startling effects. But he pays a pretty steep price for them, either through a self-defeating technique or through an insufficiently mastered one. For, unable to advance through plot, The Blacks can only assault through repetition. True ritual serves well-defined occasions; "ritual'' here is stretched out to meet a varying host of demands. The shocking, never...
...Albee's famed mano a mano between Natural and Ivy League Man, running on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's lucid monologue, Krapp's Last Tape; Hedda Gabler, another excellent production in the Fourth Street Theater's Ibsen series; The Balcony, French Playwright Jean Genet's superb argument that the world is a mammoth cat house...