THE BLACKS You'll Feel Better About Smoking with the Taste of Kent!
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LORILLARD COMPANY • FIRST WITH THE FINEST CIGARETTES • THROUGH LORILLARD RESEARCH @1961 P. Lorillard Co. I 2 SHOWS/LL sliding realities, due no doubt to their in• ~;·aincd, or h.ibitual, sense of dualism in our culture that I mentioned earlier. ln this respect, it's interesting to note that the London production has reportedly run in to considerable difficulty in finding a suitable cast among British Negroes. To this picture of sliding realities, we must acld further lines of departure, or points of view, in Genet's cubistic - for want of another word-drama. In keep• ing with either the letter or spirit of his work, 1 have exploited the use of masks, music and choreography and audience p:1rticipation, among other devices. But I hasten to acid that none of these ele• ments has been willfully grafted on as an extraneous source of excitement. Rather have l tried to direct them all to the dra• matic point, as rivers might be led to con• verge in to a single swelling force. That "total theatre" concepts, aside from our musical comedies, still mark a radical departure from the na iuralism that we are most accustomed to is in my view unfortunate. It is in a new direction that I feel the theatre must go if it is to sound back to today's audience the deeper evocations or echoes of its own sensibility. A new trend demands in a sense a return to the reli• gious ritualistic theatre of the Greeks, or to the more active and intimate frank the• atre of the Elizabethans. Yet, it must still be wholly modern ancl entirely our own in that it must cull its substance from the contemporary conscience of our culture. Genet has provided a vehicle that, at least in my mind, demands the kind of "total theatre" that I have always strived [or. It has, as you may perceive, been a compelling challenge for me to try to meet him on his own ground. I trust the audi• ence will agree with me, regardless of the extent of my success or failure as the di· rector of T lie B lochs, that the "ground" Genet stands on is an eminence from which we may survey a vast plain of mean• ingfol reality plus. JUNE 15 ~-··<~::. I / !} I ; I BEACH and TRAVEL ATOMIZER WHITE SHOULDERS or MOST PRECIOUS The ideal travel companion ... in non-spill, unbreakable plastic spray container, 2. 75 plus tax Jean Genet's The Blacl{_s 1 / Bernard Fveclitman \\'hen The Blacks was presented in white could participate o profoundly in I Paris in 1959, it was hailed as a landmark their negritude, referred to him, in their I I in the history of the theatre. In Holland, puvzlement, as a "white Negro." That was I where the first foreign production took their way of resisting the spell in which place in February of this year, a critic de• they too were caught, for Genet, who is clared that "it is LO the modern theatre merciless in his castigation of the whites, what Picasso's Gueruica is to modern is without sentimentality in his contem• p.unt.ing." \'\'bat is The Blacks? pla tion of the victims. He sees the op• pressed as future oppressors, fated to take The Blacks is an exercise in black magic. over the role of master in the endless play It undertakes, from the moment the cur• of shifting power. tain is drawn, to provoke the spectator's uneasiness, to disorient him. It appears at "One evening," says the author, "an ac• first lo be a play within a play ... within tor asked me to write a play for an all• a pht) ... within ... But this appearance black cast. But what exactly is a black? pron:s illusory. The straight line ceases to First of all, what's his color?" We are progress, changes direction, then abrupt• warned at once that we are entering the ly rises LO another level. An increasingly ambiguous. Ancl the more deeply we pene• complex figure is elaborated before the trate, the greater our unsureness, for t.he spectator's eyes. But, though it is com• ambiguity is radical. Never are we certain plex, it is not esoteric. Viewed from the of what we sec and hear. \\'hen are the proper point, everything falls into order, persons on the stage playing and when are and a rigorous, almost geometric structure they not? \Vhen do they speak the truth stands before us. Nothing in The Blacks and when do they lie? Is their lyricism a is gra Lui tous or private. spomaneous outpouring, or are they mere• Jean Genet, the maker of the music, is ly opening ancl closing a faucet at wil l• a white man. The all-Negro cast that per• \\'e are ba'.T;ed and thwarted. We arc formed the play in Paris, amazed that a cruelly mocked. \Ve are made to squirm. SHOWBILL is published monthly by Newcastle Publications, lnc., 636 11th Ave., New York 36, N. Y. © 1961 by Newcastle Publications, Inc. All rights reserved under Universal and Pan-American Conven• tions. Reproduction without permission of any material contained herein is prohibited. Peter Bogdanovich, editor of program section. JUNE 3 --------~ --·----------- FOR THAT FEELING OF UTTER LUXURY Start your day or evening with a bath that leaves your skin soft and sweetly scented. A few drops in your tub or on your skin perfume your bath - and you - with a fresh and heartlifting fragrance that clings for hours with sweet persistence. ~etm~ff& Jhcm~ 4 SHOWS ILL The Blacks is the logical progression in the destruction of the naturalistic theatre that Genet began in The Maids and car• ried forward in The Balcony. His deepest purpose as a dramatist becomes fully ap• parent in the work to be presented this month: to return to the origins of the the• atre. lf he brusquely dismisses, as he does, the drama that has dominated the western stage for almost a century, it is because he is convinced that noble theatre is theatri• cal. Man is the theatrical animal, and his theatricality explains his greatness and folly. This theatricality, which is false• ness, is the subject of all Genet's plays, and he is utterly serious in calling so meaning• ful a work as The Blacks "a clown show." The Maids, The Balcony and The Blacks are steps in a progression aimed at re-es• tablishing a modern form of the theatre of ritual. Genet is endeavoring to create a theatre which is a ceremony. In The Maids and The Balcony, ceremony is achieved through the behavior of the char• acters, who enact a ritual. However, this is not achieved simply and directly, but through a dramatic irony peculiar to a sensibility that is both archaic and mod• ern. Genet seems to be writing a play, he seems to be presenting an action. For more than two hours we watch the magician moving his objects about the stage, ad• dressing us now solemnly, now sardonical• ly. And at the end, when the elaborate structure appears to be completed, we dis• cover that there has been no plot at all, that the magician has been diverting our attention in order to impose upon us the true action, the ceremony itself, which is a lyrical and symbolic murder of the op• pressor. 'Vho is the oppressor? Is it the white race? Those who see in the play only a gesture of hatred-which is indeed there• have stopped mid-way. They must push further. If they do, they will be rewarded, not only by an aesthetic vision of extra• ordinary richness and complexity, but by a sovereign meditation on the nature of power. JUNE MARTEX® SOMETHING OLD SOMETHING NEW SOMETHING BORROWED SOMETHING MARTEX ... SHE CAN'T GET MARRIED WITHOUT MARTEX ! 6 SHOWBILL ''The Blacks" / Gene Frankel (Gene Fvank el , director of such off-Broad• physics. The reasons for this "lag" are way dramas as Machinal, Volpone, which worth pondering; but more to the point is won him several off-Broadway awards, and the fact that abstract or non-representa• An Enemy of the People, is the director of tiona 1 theatre is finally challenging us with [ean Genet's The Blacks which opened at full force. In short, it is demanding its the SI. Marks Playhouse May 4th.) day and must be reckoned with on its own terms. I dwell on this because all during the ~ot long ago a friend who heard I was production of The Blacks I was nagged by directing Jean Genet's The Blacks stopped the fear - and still am - that the tremen• me on the street.