Word: genetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they stood outside the entrance door to a house production at 8:45 on opening night, waiting for a scared cast to finish its final dress rehearsal, five minutes prior to repeating it all in front of their first audience. Robert Ginn's ambitious, technically complex, production of Jean Genet's The Balcony never even made it through that all-important final run-through, and suffered consequently from an almost total absence of pacing on opening night (it ran approximately three and three-quarter hours). Undaunted, Ginn has over the week-end edited some of the more repetitious sections...
...novels and films of Genet which discuss homosexuality create a mystique stressing physical strength and masculinity, ignoring the feminine mannerisms we associate with theatrical homosexual archetype: his lyrical phallic montage, Un Chant D'Amour; is in its own strange fashion one of the most intense statements of masculine potency on film. While Genet assaults his audience with one or another shocking perversion, he is also telling them that abnormality does not, in the last analysis, exist and sexual perversion, regardless of its nature, is as divine a form of love as those more commonly sanctioned...
...Similarly, Irma is conceived as the Madam of an answering service, a nervous dike devoid of femininity and consequent feminine insight. This is supported by the text often, particularly in the dialogue with Carmen, but it annihilates any credibility to her stated relationship with Georges, the chief of police. Genet's contradictions work better set in a world where men are more-or-less men and women women; when the men are made effeminate and the women overly masculine, the text appears too-soon banal, the action singularly purposeless. The actors in the Balcony are always pawing at one another...
...uninteresting, as was Janet Bowes as a listless Carmen. Michael McKean did the Envoy with excellent comic precision, although by playing it gay he threw the production over the edge, as far as this reviewer was concerned. Only Lisa Kelley successfully conveyed something of the balances and conflicts in Genet's many strange worlds. But as Chantal the revolutionary she comes on late and, on opening night, the battle had been lost long before...
...redemptively altered and restored to respect, purpose and value. But the catastrophic events of 20th century history have shattered the presumptions of the problem play. Man's ineradicable genius for evil has reduced the doctrine of social engineering to puny tinkering. Playwrights like Beckett, lonesco and Genet have abandoned admonitory Ibsenite finger-waving for a nerve-shattering look into the abyss of existence itself, which in their view is stingingly futile, innately unjust and thoroughly absurd. In the future it may be said that they held a broken mirror up to the nature...