Word: genetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jean Genet...
...Ionesco is the playwright of the man who stands alone contemplating the difficulty of human communication, Genet represents the man who has been kicked to the ground and lies screaming. Only it's not a man at all: it's a woman and a homoexual and a convict. For, like the Atheist of the joke who antagonizes his religious friends by saying: "Sure, I believe in an anthropomorphic God: she's a Negro," Genet warns that White Christian Civilization must face up to its outcasts...
...Maids concerns two servants who play out a dream-game whenever their mistress is absent. In the game one emulates the Mistress and the other plays the trainbearer who finally kills her superior. Always killing characters behind their masks, Genet screams that he is taking revenge...
...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...