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The Blacks (Genet)
The Blacks (Genet)
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Author: Jean Genet Publisher: Grove Press Format: Softcover # of Pages: 130 Pub. Date: 1994 ISBN-10: 0802150284 ISBN-13: 9780802150288 Cast Size: 5 female, 9 male
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About
the Play:
The Blacks (English-language version of Les Nègres)
is a full-length drama by Jean Genet, translated from the
French by Bernard Frechtman. A troupe of black actors re-enact
the rape and murder of a white woman before a kangaroo court and thus
begins The Blacks a play that examines racism and oppression
through the ritualistic re-enactment of a murder where all the
participants are played by black actors – even the white
characters.
The Blacks is a multi-faceted work, drawn
from the burlesque theatre of clowns, ritual, and
improvisation. Subtitled "A Clown Show," stereotyping, masking and clowning would be the tools with which Jean Genet dissected settled ideas of race and identity. Using the framework of a play
within a play, a troupe of black actors re-enact the ritualistic rape
and murder of a white woman before a jury of white-masked blacks who
represent in caricature members of the English upper class: a
missionary bishop, an island governor general, and a haughty Queen
and her entourage. When they have played out their weird and gruesome
crime, they turn on their judges and condemn them to death. Then,
with polite adieux to the spectators, they dance the Mozart minuet
with which the play began. Written by Jean Genet at the
request of a black actor for a play with an all-black cast, The Blacks is considered to be one
of the most consequential plays of the 20th century.
The 1961 American premiere of The Blacks is remembered for
a number of powerful reasons. It was one of the first big successes
of then budding off-off-Broadway movement. It was also one of the
longest-running New York productions not on Broadway, playing 1,408
performances at the St. Mark's Theater. Most importantly, however, it
was a landmark in African-American theatre, as the cast was entirely
made of black men and women, many of whom went on to greater fame.
Among the actors to pass through the cast were then-unknowns James
Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Lou Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Billy
Dee Williams, Charles Gordone, and Maya Angelou.
Cast: 5 female, 9 male
What people say:
"Jean Genet's
incendiary racial drama packs so many wallops, you don't know where
the next punch is coming from. Genet's skewering of racial
perceptions, his powerful meditation on human cruelty, and his ironic
subversion of the audience's theatrical expectations are all so
powerful, the audience is often left reeling. This is Genet at his
most blistering, shocking, and dangerous: One can only imagine the
public's reaction when the play premiered back in the 1960s."
— Backstage
"In form, [The
Blacks] flows as freely as an improvisation, with fantasy,
allegory and intimations of reality mingled into a weird, stirring
unity… Genet's investigation of the color black begins where most
plays of this burning theme leave off." — New York
Times
About the Playwright:
Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a prominent and controversial
French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.
Early in his life he was a homeless man and petty criminal, but later
took to writing. His work, much of it considered scandalous when it
first appeared, is now placed among the classics of modern literature
and has been translated and performed throughout the world.
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