THE MAIDS
This production is so incoherent that I was driven to reference works to regain some notion of what this play might possibly have intended. Jean Genet’s own introduction to The Maids is of no help whatsoever. (“I thus hoped also to obtain the abolition of characters … and to replace them by symbols as far removed as possible, at first, from what they are to signify, and yet still attached to it in order to link by this sole means author and audience; in short, to make the characters on the stage merely the metaphors of what they were to represent.”) Perhaps that’s why a number of other intellectuals, ranging from the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to theater scholar Robert Brustein, have undertaken to explain Genet’s work to the public. It makes for some very dry reading, so allow me to boil it down to a few probably reductive and highly personal insights.
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B.L. Johnson’s direction is frustrating. She seems to have translated the written word into the spoken voice without any understanding of what it all means. Speeches just come out of the actors’ mouths as if they were puking up a half-digested dictionary. In suiting the action to the word, Johnson relies on slim or no motivation at all, with an eye toward creating only the bluntest of stage pictures. For instance, Solange collapses unexpectedly at one point, and you have no idea why, until Claire “justifies” it with her next line, “Stand up straight.” And if you like that, you’ll love the red lighting and drummer-in-a-box mood music which highlights Solange’s big execution fantasy. I tell you, I don’t know what Johnson had in mind when she read this play. My only clue that she might, just maybe, have been trying to make a social statement is the fact that black actors are cast as the maids, and the Madame is played by a white actor. I suspect this isn’t exactly what Genet intended. Actually, in his own premiere, Genet insisted that all parts be played by men in drag.
