Word: genet
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...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; In the Jungle of Cities, a mystifying but thoroughly stimulating early play by Bertolt Brecht; The Balcony, French Playwright Jean Genet's superb argument that the world is a mammoth cat house...
Sean O'Casey's Drums Under the Window is a lilting work that makes golden use of the English language. With this exception, however, the downtown offerings generally range from pretentious to overtly sheckel-minded. An example of a play with static ideas and superficial newness is Genet's The Balcony, one of off-Broadway's biggest hits. Despite its pretensions of originality, it bogs down in a miasma of unreality and philosophical despair. The play first states that men patronize brothels not for sexual satisfaction, but in order to fulfill self-illusions; to try to translate their dreamworlds into...
Anti-intellectual, full of theatrical prankishness and a fondness for humanity that is edged in bitterness, Eugene Ionesco, with Jean Genet (The Balcony) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), is one of the main forces in what he calls the School of Paris and most people call the avant-garde theater. From an obscure job in a firm publishing legal books, he emerged ten years ago at the age of 38 to begin writing theatrical works that were generally called obscure too. But like Genet and Beckett, he has expressed his themes less in dialogue than in the structure...
...budget Workshop productions. Besides providing one student a chance to test his playwrting on audiences (as indicated earlier), the Theatre Workshop gave Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, Adamov's Professor Taranne, Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent, Synge's Shadow of the Glen, Genet's The Maids, David English's Waiting for Goodman, Robert Shure's Twink, Ionesco's Jack and O'Neill's The Rope. The production of the last-named was totally inept, but the rest were well worth a visit, with outstanding performances by Thomas D. Griffin '61 in the Beckett...
Half a dozen first-rate holdover shows reflect the steadily improving quality of the fare in off-Broadway playhouses: Little Mary Sunshine, a musical spoof of old-time operettas; A Country Scandal, an early Chekhov play produced professionally for the first time in the U.S.; The Balcony, Jean Genet's mordant and amusingly symbolic study of politics in a brothel; The Connection, a plotless, devastatingly naturalistic, jazz-counterpointed evening with a collection of junkies; Krapp's Last Tape, a one-actor one-acter by Samuel Beckett, throwing a man's youth into the face...