Word: genetical
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CASTRATED clergymen, ingratiating prostitutes, and lusty rebels: The Blacks has all these in its menagerie of characters. With endearing clumsiness and sententious didacticism, Jean Genet has written a clowncrie (clown show) as subtle as this production at the Loeb Drama Center is deft and forthright. The New African Company, in conjunction with the Theatre Company of Boston, offers on the Loeb mainstage (normally bereft of black performers) a panoply of gifted black actors and actresses, in a visual spectacle of remarkable exuberance...
...Queen. played with amusing coquetry by Marilyn Ann Carington, conveys an air of nuanced gentility, not without redemptive power in Genet's scheme of values. She is the world-weary purveyor of artifice-a figure "half mythological and half conventional" like Mme, de Vionnet in The Ambassadors. Beneath her polished regality lurks desire for total capitulation to the revitalizing force which the Blacks as revolutionaries represent...
...Genet and his hagiographer and fellow-playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, have delved with varying degrees of success into problems of race warfare and prejudice. Sartre's The Respectable Prostitute is emblematic of French ideological radicalism carried to its most tiresome and banal extremes. Genct's special merit is his ability to collapse ideological confrontation into self-defeating burlesque which exhausts both characters and audience. His mythological perspective, always starkly simplistic. escapes shrill fury through an almost lyrical insistence on the superhuman labor which sustains all role-playing in the phantasy-world of theatre...
Unfortunately, the monumental weariness which Genet so effectively conveys has no compelling cathartic quality: The Blacks, like The Balcony and The Screens. is structured around a series of totally static ritual ceremonies. which tread lightly on the borderline between the crudest naturalism and the most cerebral symbolism. Harold Scott, director of The Blacks and recipient of the Obie Award for an off-Broadway performance in Genet's Deathwatch, has resolved the latent tensions in Genct's material in the direction of naturalism-obviating some of the ludicrous pitfalls which plagued Joseph Strick in his attempt to film The Balcony...
...GENET, unable to adopt an unambivalent revolutionary stance, renders absurd the strident fury which grips the rebels, led by the vociferous Archibald Absalom Wellington. James Spruill, dynamicas Wellington, herds and coerces his wards like recalcitrant children. Only the black women, free from sexual ambivalence in their attitude toward the white Queen, can maintain a consistent level of vituperation and hatred. The ruling classes, perversely enough, are ennobled by their tenacious role consistency; directionless rage and degrading imitation is, in Genet's crypto-conservative vision, the lot of revolutionaries...