Word: genetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Balcony. The first brothel was a temple. In antiquity the Mother Goddess was worshiped in the person of the sacred prostitute. Today the idea of erotic relations between heaven and earth persists in the fantasies of a frightening Frenchman named Jean Genet, an abandoned child who became successively a thief, a prostitute, a convict, and the most ferociously brilliant poet now at work in the French theater of the absurd. In The Balcony, a drama that resembles both a burlesque show and a Black Mass. Genet expounds his fantasies in a monstrous metaphor: the world is a vast brothel operated...
...this point, Genet's play dissolves hideously into myth: the immortal myth of the new king who conquers the old king, and then celebrates his marriage to the Mother Goddess with a rite of self-castration. The rebel leader comes to the brothel, buys the illusion that he is the strongman, and at the climax of his impersonation mutilates himself. To delete this episode is to castrate the drama. The moviemakers delete it and the play ends not with a scream but a snigger...
...earlier scenes, however, the low jinks are vigorous and apropos. Genet has a gruesomely pictorial sense of humor ("Is the archbishop dead?"-"I hope so. His head is tied to the handlebars of a little boy's bicycle") and Scenarist Ben Maddow has a cute wit of his own ("The world is full of whores, but a good bookkeeper is hard to find"). Too often, unhappily, the film is cute where the play was poetic, too often Director Joseph Strick permits his performers to natter what they are intended to intone. But moments of lurid lyricism survive, and vestiges...
...great many other people appear in one scene only, at the headquarters of a revolutionary cell. The scene itself is slow and partially irrelevant to the whole play; Genet changed it radically for the second French edition. Nevertheless, William Hart is very repellent (as he should be) as Armand, the Hood. But Marcus Powell (Roger the Plumber) speaks as if he memorized words by rote from a foreign language...
Still, Stotter and his cast have given Genet more than his due. It is a shame they chose this play...