Word: genetic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
...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...