Word: genetical
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...surrealism and college humor, young (25) Arthur Kopit has mounted a splendidly zany attack on Mom behind the jawbreaking title, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hun? You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Having recently crossed the 500 mark in performances, Jean Genet's audacious, exotic, unsentimental and eloquent dramatization of the color question, The Blacks, is still being enacted with undiminished zest and style...
...first performance didn't in fact realize the play was over when it came to an end. They waited for more, not because they expected an explicit disentanglement of the sketch's nebulous events--probably they had already become familiar with the promising ambiguities of Pinter, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet--but because the classics of the theatre of the abstract have been long-winded. This one was rapid, lucid; and also banal...
...believe that this gray-haired, begowned lady well into her sixties is a young girl disguised as a young man (an Elizabethan spectator would be expected to take this lady for a boy playing a girl disguised as a young man--the kind of multiple twist that only Genet in The Maids has been able to bring off to perfection...
...when a man screams for an hour and a half his voice loses its urgency, let alone its audibility. And Genet, for all his violence and class-consciousness, for all his loud identification with the poor, black, female, criminal, perverted oppressed underdog, is a thoroughly non-Revolutionary playwright. To him, all change is sham (as in the Balcony where the victorious insurrectionaries return to the brothel with a set of illusions sicker than those of the ousted eminences). Genet's underdogs do not want to seize the world and change it; they only want to reverse its order. His Blacks...
...Both Genet and Ionesco are admittedly ill at case with the dramatic illusion. So it is more than coincidental that both explore the possibilities of the play within the play, and make stringent demands on their actors. In The Chairs, Stanley Jay and Mary Alice Bayth do a superb job, turning emptiness into a tangible reality. Had this standard been sustained after intermission, much might have been done to put M. Genet's poetry into context and to make his fury more comprehensible. Sylvia Gassel, though, could not innoculate her long, apocalyptic soliloquies with meaning, and the audience lapsed from...