“Acts have esthetic and moral value only insofar as those who perform them are endowed with power.” In his first prison novel, Jean Genet, the narrator in Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943), off-handedly puts forward this theory of gesture as young Louis Coulafroy wanders unnoticed into the village chapel, where he profanes the altar and knocks over a ciborium. It is typical of Genet’s early style to be sententious in passing, but the notion that power transforms movement into actions of “esthetic and moral value” lays wide open the mechanism of his great play, recently at the Artistic Home in West Town, The Maids (Les bonnes, 1947), a one-act drama loosely inspired by the Papin sisters, who murdered their employer René Lancelin and her adult daughter at their home in 1933.
In Genet’s theater, as well as in the more documentary and diagnostic areas of his early prose writings, there is no disjunction of the aesthetic and the ethical for those in control of their destinies. What the masters do is beautiful because it’s what masters do. The rest of us primp and imitate, for better or worse. The symbolic gestures of priests imitate the first executant, Christ. Lovers morph into one another over time: “A male that fucks a male is a double male!” screams Darling Daintyfoot, the pimp in Our Lady. Danger, the creative threat of it, creeps into the frame wherever powerless, hounded people violate their born roles, either through blatant insurrections in manners or through shamelessly and covertly behaving like big shots. Claire, the one maid, trying on Madame’s red velvet gown from the closet, finds she looks better in it than her “flabby” boss ever did. Solange, her accomplice, speaks too heightened a language for a domestic in a French play. There is a tradition going back to Roman comedy that these breaks with appropriate class behavior will always be paid for in blood, to yips of applause, and nobility exonerated; Genet incurred scandal in his day by showing the maids’ crime while eliding their justice immanente. But we can’t imagine these unpunished moments of triumph lasting. And furthermore, Genet never lets us unsee what a maid in red velvet has always been in plays: an omen of social chaos. There are and always will be, as Solange says, “gestures reserved for Madame.” “The maids’ dilemma is that there is nothing they can do to Madame that would not confirm their identity as maids,” writes Leo Bersani, Genet’s best critic.[1] To muck around with Madame’s privileged gestures in secret—as we see the maids spend the better part of the play doing before their climax—is to expose, palpate, and in a bizarre way honor, life’s most fragile hierarchies.
This production, directed by Michael Conroy, stars two drag performers from Chicago as Claire and Solange. Very imperfect speakers, Patience Darling and Hinkypunk are stage actresses only to a point. They both, and Patience Darling especially, tend to overexaggerate the floweriness in Genet’s long speeches. (The parts that are written as spoken barbs aimed at one other’s throats fare better at their hands than the flashier ones.) But drag’s poetics of the overwrought lends a fruitful destabilizing effect to Conroy’s production.
Acting is never just acting, though. Appearance is at a heightened register from the beginning. Patience Darling and Hinkypunk’s extraordinary makeup compounds and emboldens the eye until it dominates face and forehead. By virtue of casting drag queens in the first place, the drama of confinement to a specific gender plays out within the work’s pre-inscribed emphasis on class confinement, staging, in effect, drag’s rebellion against a society-wide theater of gender as allied to the maids’ struggle for reinscription and recognition at Madame’s house. Bold politics only excuse so much; cues do drop, and diction flutters; but we get electricity throughout, and whether these are great performances or no, they can’t easily be forgotten.
This production’s fixation on the visual and bodily is thanks in no small part to the suggestiveness of Zachery Wagner’s costume design. The back of Solange’s leather apron is in a harness shape, with harness fasteners. That’s not how maid’s uniforms work. It would usually be two gored panels in front and the same in the back, or a halter. Claire’s kinky buckling collar isn’t standard either. These are bondage outfits. The play as a whole is thick with bondage vibes, as when Solange pulls out a riding crop from behind Madame’s closet and twirls it over Claire’s hunched limbs on the line, “Take your place for the ball.” There is consent, we feel—it’s vicious, but it’s a game. Then the game goes too far.
Cooped up in the mistress of the house’s bedroom all day long while she’s out, Claire and Solange begin the play, not as Claire and Solange, but as “Madame” and “Claire.” In character, so to speak, they apply Madame’s perfume, rough up her Louis XV chairs, take pins from her vanity, and so on, purring with delight and occasionally slapping one another silly. What’s immediately clear about this sadistic round of recess is that our maids are horribly depressed, vengeful, and up to their noses in reckless fantasy lives. They dub their routine a “ceremony”; within it, no meaningful distinction obtains between disciplinary thrashings in character—that is, as Claire (“Madame”) tyrannizing over Solange (“Claire”), kicking and slapping her to pieces—and real ones, so long as Solange’s blood gets scrubbed off the steps before Madame, the actual Madame, played by Brookelyn Herbert, returns. To end the ceremony, to start the world over again on fairer terms, or simply to get out of this damn apartment once and for all, someone is going to have to die. That somebody is Madame.
But in the play’s atmosphere of dreadful imposture, Claire’s idea of murdering Madame with a drugged tea feels like something in a dream, even as it starts to happen. A degree of mistrust on the viewer’s part seems sane to me. What’s plotted, what’s carried through, and what’s simply a case of cabin fever and patent leather talking, is very much left up in the air. Are we to take Claire at her word that it was she, Claire, who fingered Madame’s beau (a “Monsieur,” who does not appear) to the police for petty theft? Does Madame die? Does Claire? Is Solange arrested? We need an outside perspective, a second opinion. With no Fortinbras to show up and inventory the Act Five carnage at Elsinore with a level head, no policeman to scratch his stomach in the doorway and say “What in the hell happened here?”, we can never know for sure what went down or was about to go down at Madame’s place. Additionally, there’s a Mario the milkman. Here, Genet’s arch faith in the blur, his refined taste for sham, is at its most troublesome. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1952 introduction to Les bonnes, describes the “whirligigs of being and appearance” in Genet’s prison books and early theater as a vast array of sophistic circles.[2] Okay, Epimenides. So either this milkman has gotten in through the window and raped both Claire and Solange, or else maybe, in a different telling that follows, he has impregnated Solange with an unborn fetus that she and Claire will somehow both be carrying and delivering in tandem—or perhaps, as feels more than likely, there isn’t any milkman at all, and we’ve gone a little crazy in here, what with the heat and perfumed air.
Director Michael Conroy never forces the issue one way or the other on these perplexities, but the late entrance of Madame at least compels a crude accounting for some of the incrimination and doom that the play claustrophobically bandies for its first hour prior to her arrival. She is magnificently bossy and fatuous. She wants to know who used her perfume: it was Claire. That clarity is so refreshing after our hieratic season in hell that, even if it’s fleeting clarity, we’ll take it. It’s fascinating to compare Herbert’s signature gestures with Patience Darling’s ventriloquism during the ceremony. One suddenly realizes just how much you have to love someone and study them in order to do a convincing impression, how much psychic real estate they will necessarily have to colonize before their moves can come out of your body, their voice from your mouth. But if some combination of envy and misfortune ever made you want to become that person, you would never be able to, and that might make you want to kill them.
This is a queasy play. Not the least troubling of its effects is the sense of a bedrock familiarity with human conduct, as seen through the cracked glass of Genet’s lifelong experiment in deformed life. The show ends, as it started, mysteriously, neck-deep in the rubble of Solange’s towering threnody of a final monologue. In a deposition to the invisible police, Hinkypunk calls up unbelievable power, which we have seen only the surface of until now, for almost ten whole minutes of speech. A shocking finish, out of nowhere it blazes on the wreckage of three ruined lives, is amazing, and signifies nothing.
[1] Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 173.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction,” The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays, by Jean Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1994), 1.
August 2018