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The Blacks (Genet)

The Blacks (Genet)
Your Price: $22.95 CDN
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

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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