Word: genetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus, at the center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest-the existence problem...
Conformity yields to enormity in Jean Genet. If one can imagine Walter Mitty as a criminal, a pederast and a diabolist, one has taken a quick squint into Genet's imagination. Genet makes the erotically impossible possible. He creates nuns in black lace panties, bare-breasted prostitutes with the flowing tails of ponies. But the whores, pimps, sadists and lesbians who people his plays are also his army of revenge marshaled against the world. The ritual murder of a white woman in The Blacks is a Negro act only insofar as it contains the death wish of the outcast...
...blade is sharpened on a grindstone, Genet has defined himself against society. In a world where many people can scarcely explain what they do, a crime is at least a visible and dramatic act. Genet is the total theatrician in that he revels in making illusion indistinguishable from reality. Are the generals, bishops and judges in the brothel of The Balcony more real when they put on those costumes to gratify their sexual quirks or when they assume the same roles to govern the state? In Genet's drama, costumes not only make the man, they rule the world...
...Like Genet, John Osborne is nauseated by society, but he is less ambiguous and symbolic, more direct and realistic. There is more than a trace of Captain Bligh in him, except that he is both martinet and mutineer. He reads the riot act to his times in the accents of self-hatred. Bill Maitland says, "I myself am more packed with spite and twitching with revenge than anyone I know of. I actually often, frequently, daily want to see people die for their errors. I wish to kill them myself, to throw the switch with my own fist." There...
...presently planned, the plays will include a double bill of Jean Genet's Deathwatch, directed by Mayer, and The Maids, directed by Babe; Gerry Raffles' and Joan Littlewood's musical, Oh What a Lovely War!; and, tentatively, the American premiere of the anti-war drama Saints' Day, by the British playwright John Whiting...