THE MAIDS
Two sisters, locked in a vise of mutual love and hatred, spend their hours alone in a bizarre, ultimately deadly game of make-believe, alternating between the dominant and submissive roles of mistress and servant, lapsing in and out of rhetorical flights of melodramatic fantasy. Is it a stage version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or some exercise in gothic horror inspired by that Bette Davis-Joan Crawford cult classic?
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The play is The Maids, Jean Genet’s 1947 one-act; the above descriptions are just two of many levels on which this influential, endlessly fascinating work operates. Here’s another: Two actors find themselves cast in a play in which they play women. Their job is to create convincing characters–to make an audience believe, at least for the play’s duration, that they are the people they are playing. But no effort has been made to disguise the performers’ true gender, so their impersonations of two young women are absolutely unconvincing. Night after night these men must go out on the stage, only to face the shame and frustration of repeated failure in front of an audience.
Straying selectively from Genet’s original plan, Cesear has cast males as Solange and Claire but a woman as Madame. The faultiness of the men’s effort at female impersonation is underlined by the presence of a real woman on the stage; that highlights the maids’ ludicrous yet lethal desire to become Madame as well as to kill her. Significantly, the maids are played not by immature boys but by handsome, solidly built young men; and Cesear does not shy away from either the erotic appeal or the comic incongruity inherent in having Claire’s white slip filled out by a well-developed masculine chest and shoulders, or Solange’s starched uniform draped over a gangly male form. Still, for all their unmistakable maleness, Gregory Grene and Daniel Logan are well fitted to their roles. The tall, slim Logan expresses the scheming Solange’s corrupt criminality through a pair of burning Bette Davis eyes and a haughty intensity to match; opposite Logan’s compelling presence, the smaller, more muscular Grene recalls Joan Crawford as the self-sacrificing would-be saint, Claire. (In his wig and weirdly glossy makeup, Grene looks like a male department-store dummy perversely assigned to the ladies’-wear section; it’s a wonderful effect.)
