Jean Genet in a New Translation by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton
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July 7 –August 16, 2014 Lincoln Center Festival is sponsored by American Express August 6 –16 New York City Center Sydney Theatre Company The Maids By Jean Genet In a new translation by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton Director Benedict Andrews Designer Alice Babidge Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper Composer Oren Ambarchi Video Designer and Operator Sean Bacon Sound Designer Luke Smiles Dramaturg Matthew Whittet Assistant to the Designer Sophie Fletcher Voice and Text Coach Charmian Gradwell Translation from the original French version Julie Rose CAST Claire Cate Blanchett Solange Isabelle Huppert Mistress Elizabeth Debicki Approximate performance time: 1 hour 30 minutes, with no intermission Major Support for Lincoln Center Festival 2014 is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center Festival 2014 is made possible in part with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. The Lincoln Center Festival 2014 presentation of The Maids is made possible in part by generous support from Jennie and Richard DeScherer, The Grand Marnier Foundation, Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, and members of the Producers Circle. LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2014 THE MAIDS Director’s Note teenager. Along with Samuel Beckett and The first impulse for The Maids was the Harold Pinter, Genet formed the foundation idea of the mise en abyme —the mirror that of my theater practice and my inquiry into reflects a mirror. The play works as a what theater is. So it is interesting to come labyrinth of fictions that the maids are mov - back to a foundation piece—realizing now ing through, a kind of mirrored labyrinth this idea of ritual, the idea that all theater is whose reflection is endlessly splintering— about theater-making and about the world that is what the fiction, the language, and as a kind of theater being at the core of all the play do. In a way, the theater set does my work. the same—the glass is reflecting an actress this way while this camera is watching her The play is amazing because it proposes that way, so the whole thing is prismatic the invention of theater by people who and endlessly reflecting itself. The room don’t own theater—the mistress owns the has a sort of double function, a conven - theater and she owns culture. The maids tional theater set on one hand and a theater live entirely outside of that; they live in a lit - machine on the other. It lets the actors tle attic and everything they know has have impulses inside a concrete form to been taught to them by other people. They play in. It is very cinematic, they can sit only exist in order to be slaves and they are inside smoking a cigarette and speak the completely dispossessed—they have to text, but then if they turn and take a few invent and make up a new reality in order steps downstage they are suddenly on a to get some sense of self. Up in their attic very abstract stage. at night they tell each other their invented stories; they are cognizant of the shame of Within The Maids there is a meditation on their incestuous relationship but they also acting and on being an actress. There is have this fantasy that gives them some - also a meditation on beauty and death and thing that is theirs alone. Fantasy becomes ecstasy. These are all things that really reality and that is the condition of these interest me in the theater. Theater is a kind two women, they are trafficking in fantasy. of ritual that leads to an act of transcen - They invent these pornographic fantasies dence; transfiguration; apotheosis in the to get off, to free themselves and feel performer—something happens night after alive. They accuse each other, “I invented night as Lady Macbeth, for example, is this story and you used it all up on yourself, walking through those hallways—that an you got off on it—that story was so impor - actress must reach, a kind of apotheosis. It tant to you, you were prepared to betray must reveal something extraordinary both me on it.” That is one of the absurd and in the actor’s craft and in her ability to touch insane things about the play, these women and move you. That is what these maids are arguing over things that are so concrete are trying to achieve. They are trying to get to them yet they don’t exist. They’ll die to a point of ecstasy and transformation over them, but they don’t exist! through their ritual. So it is a very interesting theater document to be making. Sartre calls There is a line Solange has, “My jet of spit it a whirligig of appearances, and reflections is my spray of diamonds.” All of Genet is in of, truth and reality. I think that is what we this line: the lowest of the low, the poorest, are trying to do: set all that spinning. have nothing but their spit and nothing but their hate. They don’t have the diamonds I have always loved this play and Genet has of the wealthy like their mistress—spit is been very important to me since I was a transformed into diamonds—that is an act LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2014 THE MAIDS of theater-making. The child draws a circle employer—is a theme that seemed to res - in the sand and says “now this is my cas - onate with Genet and would be explored tle.” We do it every day in theater, we take again and again in future works. a stick and say this is the sword that kills Hamlet. That poverty of gesture, that Genet’s other early works, Deathwatch poverty and sacredness of gesture and and The Balcony , explore themes of free - transferral is the theater act. “My jet of spit dom, powerlessness, and rejection, often is my spray of diamonds.” with conflicted, sexually subversive char - acters trapped in worlds that do not accept —Benedict Andrews them. Genet used prisons, brothels, and bedrooms in each of these plays to explore his characters’ complex relationship with About Genet and power, sex, and identity. Each of these set - The Maids tings, well understood by Genet from per - He “liked the darkness, even as a child.” sonal experience, often blurred the lines He was against the rules and against the between illusion and reality, individual and law. He explained, not long before his society, truth and narrative. death, that he had “decisively repudiated” a world that had repudiated him. The role of prostitute was also one Genet had personal experience with, and used Jean Genet may well have been, as more than once in his narratives to ask Simone de Beauvoir put it, a “thug of blunt, but necessary, questions about our genius.” He was certainly—and often all relationship with society, as well as our at once—a thief, a soldier, a prisoner, a enslavement to institutions, to relation - prostitute, an activist, and an ardent lover ships, and to our own definitions of our - with a taste for controversy. He was also selves. That a revolution is playing out on a writer. the streets below in The Balcony is not only a rich, textural exploration of society His work, time and again, would explore as spectacle, it hints at the possibility of this darkness to which he claimed to be destabilizing social and political structures drawn. In fact, it would not be an under - through sexual identity—something Genet statement to say that Genet was obsessed was convinced was possible. with notions of destabilization and disrup - tion. His theatrical works are often “plays Two years after The Balcony played in New within plays,” where the audience is asked York, Genet’s The Blacks would again call to con sider who is really telling the story, into question the implicit imbalances whether central characters are imagining embedded in society, specifically those their lives or living them, and always ques - based on racial identity. Subtitled, A Clown tioning who, if anyone, is telling the truth. Show , the play was intentionally unsettling and crude in its approach to issues of colo - His most famous play, The Maids , was not nialism and racial stereotypes. As a result, only beautifully written, it captured the it became the longest-running Off-Broadway imagination of a society shocked by the show of the time and has been reproduced real-life events of two maids (and sisters) and reimagined over and over. As Brian whom had murdered their wealthy employer Logan, writer for The Guardian , wrote of a and her daughter, apparently without cause. 2007 London adaptation of the play, The The subversion of power—of servant killing Blacks “doesn’t dramatize racial stereotypes LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2014 THE MAIDS so much as boil them in a pot, dance other post-structuralist writing move - around them, and dish them up for dinner.” ments and contributed to greater literary dialogue on issues of gender and sexual - And this is where Genet’s brilliance lay. He ity. It would also set the tone and form of trod the line between provocateur, advo - many of his other works, which challenge cate, and misfit with poetic talent writ not only our notions of linear narrative, but large. As Saint Genet —Jean-Paul Sartre’s of the role and quality of protagonist, hero, biographical portrait of Genet—can attest and villain.