Genet's War

By * T.E.K.

When a writer is at a loss for anything fresh to say, he sometimes cannibalizes previous successful works of his own, or cribs outright from someone else. In The Screens, Jean Genet does both. Thinly disguised furnishings of The Balcony, with its bordello fantasies, and The Blacks, with its racial voodoo masks, go floating past in this five-hour play that most nearly resembles a roiling, debris-clotted river in flood.

The Screens, however, lacks the caste v. outcast tensions of The Blacks and the musky eroticism of The Balcony. In a Genetic mutation of Bertolt Brecht, the playwright doubly fails. He tries to apply the epical veneer of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the theme of little people whipped about in a historical convulsion, in this case France's punitive struggle with Algeria. Brecht succeeded because he had a certain sympathy for the last-ditch valor of his little people even when he portrayed them as cagey sneaks. Genet fails because he regards all people as maggots.

Grandiose Pretensions. What is original in the play--its scrambled, meandering documentary account of the Algerian war--is almost worse than what is borrowed. Even when one sees the French Legionnaires and the Algerian revolutionaries, they seem like a confused army of extras recruited from Central Casting. This is not really the fault of Director Minos Volanakis or the Chelsea Theater Center, which has staged Volanakis' translation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Rather the flaw is in the script's grandiose pretensions, which dwarf interest in any individual.

When the play opens, Said (Robert Jackson), the poorest of the poor, is about to marry Leila (Janet League), the ugliest of the ugly. He steals a coat and lands in jail. She steals in order to be with him, and after that they sink from degradation to degradation. The war quickly takes center stage, with the French soldiers presented as dandified homosexuals and the rebels as little better. The language of the play is unrelentingly anal. As no great surprise, Genet finally advocates acts of evil as the only liberating force either against the old order or the new.

Such sentiments do not lend themselves to poetic eloquence. There is one performance of shining distinction, that of Despo (stage name of Greek Actress Despo Diamantidou) as a revolutionary virago. She possesses an implacable authority that would make a top sergeant blench. With Despo in command, Genet's war might have ended in five minutes rather than five hours.

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