Word: lefrance
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Jean Genet has been in prison, and his insights into the smothered aspirations and inarticulate regrets of jailed men are occasionally penetrating and even beautiful. But Louis Lopez-Cepere as the effeminate kid, Maurice, and George Quenzel as the poseur, LeFranc, shout and gesticulate until you can no longer hear M. Genet. Maurice is turned into such a hyperbolized fairy that his pathetic love and desperation become the cheapest banality. His real groping for affection is represented by nine or ten unctuous lunges at his cellmates. As for Quenzel, someone must have told him that the more important a line...
Genet's characters are intellectualizations. In Deathwatch, Green Eyes is the intellectual abstraction of a murderer, LeFranc of a petty crook, and Maurice of a thieving, confused little homosexual. And intellectualizations are not easily translated into flesh and blood. Their conflicts are worked out on a conversational plane, while the real struggles that men take part in cannot be totally represented by debate...
Green Eyes is perched on a basin and dominates the stage as Lefranc, smiling, bears down on Maurice, who in the presence of this radiant smile, also smiles ... He [Lefranc] blocks Maurice in a corner and strangles him. Maurice slides to the floor between Lefranc's spread legs...
...excitement these directions indicate. Green Eyes did not dominate the stage, and one of Genet's characteristic enigmas was dodged instead of posed: why does Green Eyes countenance the murder of Maurice, when Maurice is his friend, and when he had already stopped at least one previous attempt of Lefranc to murder Maurice...
...Garen's job is highly competent, if not brilliant profound, and the same can be said of three of his actors: George Maharis (Green Eyes), Vic Morrow (Lefranc), and Athan Karras (Guard). The fourth actor is Harold Scott '57, and his Maurice is brilliant or very near it. Even allowing for his substantial growth as an artist since he first played the part, his performance is evidence that the best Harvard acting is easily at home on the professional stage. Genet has endowed Maurice with a characteristic movement repeated several times: "Maurice flicks his head as if tossing back from...