Word: genetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ionesco and Genet write for themselves. Almost incidentally they find an audience in the small intellectual cadre capable of identifying with their plights, and the bewildered, fashionable throng that will never challenge either the playwright's meaning or the Emperor's new clothes...
...find it exceedingly difficult to characterize Vigo's method of treating dreams and reality. It does not resemble Bergman's use of symbolism, Freudian or otherwise, and it is nothing like the way Jean Genet handles many layers of illusion. Rather, Vigo deliberately distorts his story, visually and dramatically. He injects the outre in the form of a headmaster who is three feet tall and a drawing that comes to life, and he slants his scenario so that the children win. Still, he never departs far enough from normal experience to enter the surreal, and this is precisely what makes...
Even more important, there are few events as such in Genet's work, and even less power. What he offers are reports of events and images of power: a phallus in The Balcony, a racial throne in The Blacks, and a well-publicized murder in Deathwatch. Thus there are no powerful characters: only those who pretend successfully (the strong) and those who fail in their deceptions (the weak...
While his writing is filled with anger and criticism, Genet has become a popular rather than a forceful play-wright. The productions are partly to blame, as are Genet's metaphysics. His racial commentary in The Blacks has been used to titillate rather than challenge. The result is intellectual exploitation of a currently catchy theme. It becomes off-beat, not serious, hip, not important. Irony wins, not Genet: in a community that virtually exiles its militant Negro leader, Robert Williams, and castigates A. Phillip Randolph, The Blacks remains the most successful off-Broadway show...
Deathwatch, a play written more from experience and less from speculation than Genet's two New York hits, would ring true if the actors didn't consistently obstruct the lines. Sadly though, Peter MacLean as Green Eyes is the only lead with feeling or understanding in his voice; and even he seems tempted to substitute crescendo for these qualities...