Saturday, September 26, 2015

*Playwright's Corner- From The Pen Of Jean Genet-"The Blacks"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French playwright Jean Genet's play, "The Blacks".

Book Review

The Blacks, Jean Genet, 1959


Recently, in reviewing the text for the play “The Maids” by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I write the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of the play under review , The Blacks”, as well:

“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”

As I have mentioned elsewhere once I “discover” a writer I tend to read through everything else that he or she has written to see if there is anymore gold in store. That is the case here. In a race-driven and obsessed society like America, notwithstanding a current black president, the question of the relationship, for good or evil but mainly evil, between blacks and whites necessarily has to dominate the central societal drama. Many black writers, including James Baldwin or Richard Wright, have been very sensitive to that need to blacks to “wear” a mask around whites. That a French writer, immersed in white waterfront and prison lumpen culture could capture that same idea in a sharply symbolic (read the direction instructions) play is another matter.

This play, unlike “The Maid”, reaches way down to a place where most play-goings, black and white, do not want to go. And that tells the tale here. I will wonder out loud how today’s audience, spoon-fed on the notion of a “post-racial” society, would react. More simply put, this is the difference between Malcolm X’s racial truth and Martin Luther King’s. Enough said.


Note: If you look at the above linked “Wikipedia” entry for “The Blacks” you will realize that the first performances of this play was a very important part of the acting careers of many black performers, including James Earl Jones. I have seen this play but without the star-studded cast of the original performances.

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