Genet's Drama of Race Hatred Generates Destructive Passions
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Genet's Drama of Race Hatred Generates Destructive Passions The Blacks. By Jean Genet. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Directed by Gene Frankel. Presented by S....
...All the actual and possible indignities to which Negroes have been subjected are heaped together and presented as though these were the only ways in which whites have dealt with Negroes...
...they nightly violate white women and then murder them...
...At the St, Marks Playhouse...
...Every sneer of scorn or hatred that occurs to Genet is poured into the play...
...It sets on the stage grotesquely white-masked, complacent yet cowardly creatures—a colonial military governor, a judge, a missionary, a Queen and the Queen's sycophant—as foils for the Negroes...
...It lacks the grace of a cobra, but it strikes out with cobra power and poison...
...For many years, whenever racial propaganda plays have raised their issues on the stage, I have protested that frequently their effect is to intensify the prejudices they pretend to deplore...
...He grew up from orphan asylum to reformatory to prison, finding little friendliness and much violence in the white man's world...
...At the end of the play, each of the whites, after a display of ignominy, cowardice and abject pleading, is killed, and the drama culminates in a Negro dance of triumph...
...One can feel compassion for the white author of The Blacks...
...isolated as though they were the whole story, they are a monstrosity that multiplies repugnance and hate...
...With equal extremity and intensity The Blacks uses foul language and jeering or venomous action to convey its message of hatred and violence...
...bitterness finds its justification...
...Here, it can only intensify hatred and impulse to violence...
...The savagery of the play, and the enthusiastic performance of the allNegro cast, are ominous...
...His earlier writing won the admiration of some "modern" French authors, and showed some lyric power...
...but most of the time the Negroes on stage face the audience directly and address us: "You You out there You watching us You whites...
...Force is a form of tyranny...
...He has here merged his hatred with "the blacks...
...instead of crushing it, he regards it tenderly, speaks to it endearingly, then places it gently back, because it has come to him from his intimate contact with his dearly beloved male friend...
...it is an outpouring of hate against the white man...
...If a play seeks to lead the audience to an evil action or state of mind, then the better its technique the more dangerous it is: A clever playwright, an ingenious director and a capable cast may pound upon and rouse our baser passions...
...The Blacks is such a play...
...Whether or not they meet esthetic standards, they must also be judged by what they press upon life...
...History and the daily newspapers show that the free dumb soon lose what little freedom they possess...
...To show race hatred rising to a climax of destruction, with all the sufferers blackskinned and all the villains white, is to rouse righteous indignation on the one side, and on the other a mixed sense of shame and resentment that this is not the whole picture...
...In Genet's best-known book, Our Lady of the Flowers, for example, one rhapsodic passage shows the hero finding a louse in his body hair...
...played in South Africa, it could lead to a massacre of appalling proportions...
...In their proper perspective, such things are a shameful part of history...
...Presented by S. Bernstein, G. Edgar, and A. Gregory...
...gloatingly describes "strewing his sperm" into the victim before he slays her...
...With triumphal glee they dance about the coffin and strew flowers, while the murderer (or should I say "avenger...
...Hatred possesses the hater...
...Antagonisms are made more violent...
...In the play, one chant of the Negroes seems to echo: "Voodoo, Voo-doo, Free-dumb, Freedumb...
...he is enslaved, not free...
...Little of this appears in the present play, though another quality—a tendency to be extreme — is manifested throughout...
...but it is vivid...
...Violence and stupidity walk hand in hand...
...We think of the efforts being made to increase friendliness and equitable dealing between the races, and wonder at the chances for the growth of mutual understanding and joint efforts for the peaceful improvement of racial relations in this already over-ravaged world...
...It is not lyrical, it is not even dramatic...
...Propaganda plays assert values or proclaim principles, and often urge to action...
...In the play, the Negroes not only sound and resound their cry of hate...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 21
