Welton Jones

San Diego Arts

"The Maids" at Adams Avenue Studio of the Arts

By Welton Jones
Posted on Wed, Jul 13th, 2005
Last updated Sun, Jul 17th, 2005

Jean Genet gave postwar European many of its basic themes and influences just as the era was getting underway, and he continues to float effortlessly just beyond the reach of each successive avant garde.

A careful study of Genet, guided by someone trained in the continental tradition, is appropriate for all theatre students and that’s what has happened with three actresses from Columbia University who are doing some Genet for their summer vacation.

The play is “The Maids,” a famously mystical interplay of illusion on several levels which seemed to Jean-Paul Sartre a whirligig of colors spinning so fast that they become white, the false white of theatrical trickery representing the cruel lies so essential to civilization.

The actresses are Laura Butler, Kelly Eubanks and Rebecca Henderson, who call themselves the NU Classic Theatre. Their director, and the real star of this production, is Ulla Wolcz, a Romanian professor plugged into the mainstream of European experimental theatre.

They will be on view at the Adams Avenue Studio of the Arts Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. until July 21 and they deserve the widest possible audience.

Miss Wolcz not only understands the shimmering paradoxes of Genet’s vision but also the essential surrender to ritual and the need for concentrated, unified physicality. She has formed her cast with a purity and a splendor that make this production a source for an elusive but essential style.

Miss Butler, lush and dreamy, and Miss Henderson, frank and powerful, play two sister who serve as maids to a beautiful, younger Madame. In her absence, they play at being her and at being each other, drinking deeply from the humiliation of servitude and the distracted fancies of the frivolous mistress, who “loves us as she loves her bidet.”

In their love/hate, they contrive to murder Madame and to frame Monsieur (the story was suggested by an actual notorious crime in France by the Pepin sisters) but they are too incompetent, nearly, even to kill themselves. And, as their plot folds, they know they are doomed.

Miss Eubanks floats through as a fine-boned aristocratic counterfeit, toying with self drama and ringing false in every gesture. The subtle precision with which each actress’s gesture and movement has been fitted to the others’ is as much a joy to contemplate as is Genet’s own playing of sumptuous poetics against sordid plot.

Yes, the playwright specified that the maids should be played by young men, less as a matter of his own homosexual fantasies than as another way of introducing layers of illusion. But he also waived the requirement for the 1947 Paris premiere. And actresses as talented as these bring their own kit of nuance and ambiguity.

The uncredited sets and costumes are all that’s needed; the bursts of Beethoven and Mozart are perhaps more than necessary. And I was disappointed that the translator was acknowledged. (This is not, I think, the standard 1954 version by Bernard Frechtman.)

But I wasn’t disappointed in anything else.

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About the author: Welton Jones has been reviewing shows for 52 years as of October 2007, 35 of those years at the UNION-TRIBUNE and, now, eight for SANDIEGO.COM where he wrote the first reviews to appear on the site.
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