The Theatregoer The Blacks

at the Loeb Drama Center until February 15

CASTRATED clergymen, ingratiating prostitutes, and lusty rebels: The Blacks has all these in its menagerie of characters. With endearing clumsiness and sententious didacticism, Jean Genet has written a clowncrie (clown show) as subtle as this production at the Loeb Drama Center is deft and forthright. The New African Company, in conjunction with the Theatre Company of Boston, offers on the Loeb mainstage (normally bereft of black performers) a panoply of gifted black actors and actresses, in a visual spectacle of remarkable exuberance.

Genet and his hagiographer and fellow-playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, have delved with varying degrees of success into problems of race warfare and prejudice. Sartre's The Respectable Prostitute is emblematic of French ideological radicalism carried to its most tiresome and banal extremes. Genct's special merit is his ability to collapse ideological confrontation into self-defeating burlesque which exhausts both characters and audience. His mythological perspective, always starkly simplistic. escapes shrill fury through an almost lyrical insistence on the superhuman labor which sustains all role-playing in the phantasy-world of theatre.

Unfortunately, the monumental weariness which Genet so effectively conveys has no compelling cathartic quality: The Blacks, like The Balcony and The Screens. is structured around a series of totally static ritual ceremonies. which tread lightly on the borderline between the crudest naturalism and the most cerebral symbolism. Harold Scott, director of The Blacks and recipient of the Obie Award for an off-Broadway performance in Genet's Deathwatch, has resolved the latent tensions in Genct's material in the direction of naturalism-obviating some of the ludicrous pitfalls which plagued Joseph Strick in his attempt to film The Balcony.

The New African Company, while avoiding sterile and monochromatic abstraction, cannot entirely escape the verbal straitjacket in which Genct has encased his ideas. While reveling in the astonishing exoticism of Esther Folle's portrayal of Felicity Trollop Pardon or Mary Alice's impish Stephanie Virtue Secret-rose Diop, one can hardly forget that, without the stage presence of these strong personalities, the characters would be entirely forgettable-perhaps, even interchangeable. Gustave Johnson (as Deodatus Village) and Catherine Sella (as Adelaide Bobo) lack the requisite intensity and control to attain a similar mastery over their roles.

THE BLACKS is a play much more difficult to describe than to comprehend visually: especially since John Thornton's set design and Lewis Rampino's costumes manage to establish with ruthless clarity the interrelationship (emotional, political, sexual) of this curious pastiche of characters. The Blacks-the suppressed minority, whether sexual deviants, freethinking criminals, disgruntled lackeys-all consort to overthrow the Establishment, symbolized by the Queen, the Judge and the Governor, perched high aloft the stage on a wooden scaffold, At center stage sits the draped coffin of a white woman, supposedly massacred by the Blacks.

The Queen. played with amusing coquetry by Marilyn Ann Carington, conveys an air of nuanced gentility, not without redemptive power in Genet's scheme of values. She is the world-weary purveyor of artifice-a figure "half mythological and half conventional" like Mme, de Vionnet in The Ambassadors. Beneath her polished regality lurks desire for total capitulation to the revitalizing force which the Blacks as revolutionaries represent.

GENET, unable to adopt an unambivalent revolutionary stance, renders absurd the strident fury which grips the rebels, led by the vociferous Archibald Absalom Wellington. James Spruill, dynamicas Wellington, herds and coerces his wards like recalcitrant children. Only the black women, free from sexual ambivalence in their attitude toward the white Queen, can maintain a consistent level of vituperation and hatred. The ruling classes, perversely enough, are ennobled by their tenacious role consistency; directionless rage and degrading imitation is, in Genet's crypto-conservative vision, the lot of revolutionaries.

The ending-a lush mass-execution of the ruling elite-was both predictable and fatiguing, as was the audience reaction. The play began and ended with a nervous burst of applause from a virtually all-white audience: a more strained combination of fear and adulation could scarcely be imagined. Dionne Warwick's "We Can Work It Out" and the alternating exuberance and discipline of the dance segments which opened and closed the drama, whether thrown in for propitiation or strictly for entertainment, were delightful. There is no real bile in this production-only a professional and richly textured vitality. Cenet, one fears, is the real culprit,