The Balcony

It was-long and repetitious, erotic and most certainly absurd. Yes, it was another evening in the Living Theater.

Director Phil Stotter and his generally competent cast struggled long and hard to make a success of things, and, in Jean Genet's terms, I suppose they did. But Genet's terms exclude most of what you and I respond to in the theater. The Balcony has no story in the normal sense and no real motivation for its characters. It does have a gimmick, a wonderful gimmick that Genet uses again and again, like a ritual. He leads us on an aimless trek down a hall of mirrors.

Mirror is the key word. The Balcony takes place in a house of illusion (and ill-fame) devoted to psycho-sexual masquerades.

For instance a gasman dresses up like an archbishop and makes one of the girls confess to him. Genet's idea is that the real archbishop, and other powerful men, are powerful only because other men imitate them in their fantasy lives. As the play continues, the masquerade gets more complicated. The pretenders become the men they have imitated, and their new power, in turn, depends on others who will imitate them. Mirror imagery and masquerade pervade every scene. There are no highpoints and no development; and the play never really ends, because the mirrors go on reflecting the same pattern.

During the first three scenes, Genet doesn't repeat himself enough to spoil his gamy jokes. If you aren't too squeamish, you will laugh when the Executioner (Frederick Q. Rice) reaches under the Whore-thief's dress and claims to have found a flashlight, bearskins and several pairs of socks in her "notorious Kangaroo pocket." If that kind of thing bothers you, stay home. There's plenty of it all the way through.

Donald Lyons (the General), whom many will remember as Agamemnon in the Ajax a few years back, is consistently entertaining. He may push a trifle too hard in places, but The Balcony needs the kind of heavy caricature that Lyons does so well. Without it, only the gimmick remains.

Jane Powell (Madame Irma) evinces an erratic but professional competence. Often she speaks with elegance, or at least worldly majesty. But at other times, frequently at crucial points in the script, she lets a sentence or two slip away unemphasized. This may result from justifiable boredom with some of her more portentously extravagant lines.

Playing opposite her as Carmen, Anne Lilley Kerr tackles a difficult role with intelligence. She manages to combine peasant piety and a whore's toughness in a complex and graceful way. John Wolfson (Chief of Police) is a fairly limited actor, but his part doesn't require much more than the two or three inflections he uses to good effect. He might, however, practice twirling a cigar some more before tonight.

A great many other people appear in one scene only, at the headquarters of a revolutionary cell. The scene itself is slow and partially irrelevant to the whole play; Genet changed it radically for the second French edition. Nevertheless, William Hart is very repellent (as he should be) as Armand, the Hood. But Marcus Powell (Roger the Plumber) speaks as if he memorized words by rote from a foreign language.

Still, Stotter and his cast have given Genet more than his due. It is a shame they chose this play.