The Maids

The Wellesley College Experimental Theatre, at the invitation of the HDC, has brought to Cambridge an often interesting, occasionally boring, thoroughly bizarre bit of drama.

The Maids was written by Jean Genet, whose notoriety is far more abundant than his talent as a writer. He is reputed to be a man with a past full of most imaginative sexual contacts, and less imaginative jail sentences. As a playwright he draws on his acquaintance with the part of mankind most easily mistakable for rats, and adds a grotesque imagination to depressing subject matter. Occasionally, pure ugliness achieves dramatic effect via shock. Often it is simply ugly.

In Deathwatch last year, brilliant directing and acting diverted attention from the fact that the play itself was rather tawdry, small, and unimpressive. The Maids is not much more of a play, although it adds to a prison-like atmosphere a perennially interesting theatrical problem: the probing of possibilities of reality vs. illusion.

The protagonists--they are far from heroines--are two maids. They resemble cockroaches, ripping one another apart.

They take turns play-acting the part of their mistress, dressing in her clothes, speaking her lines, thinking of her lover; they resent the mistress--she has the capacity, shallow though it is, to be happy. One of the maids has tried to strangle her, and failed; the other tries to poison her, and fails. Both, spilling lines at each other terribly quickly, hurl insults and acid pessimism and gloom--"I am the dung heap on which I grow"--at one another until finally, one of them poisons herself, having commanded the other to offer her the cup. Why such consciously doomed insects didn't commit suicide long ago is never clear.

Although Genet reputedly wanted to add a cynical touch to an already morbid and sexually suggestive play by having the maids acted by two men, Wellesley refrains. Patricia Adel and Lucienne Schupf were given the roles, and they gnaw through them histrionically but frequently well. Their occasional over-acting is probably very much what Genet would have wanted; it helps exaggerate the nebulous line between reality and artificiality. Now and then, perhaps due to Nadine's Duwez's direction, sharp emotion and vigorous gestures and poses come too obviously from nowhere.

Patricia Adel has a face that can freeze into a vividly discomforting mask; her movement is sometimes less successful, although properly awkward. Lucienne Schupf, extremely energetic, skillfully emphasizes the over-theatrical, nearly manic-depressive moods of her pitiful character. She throws sparks into an atmosphere that is designed to baffle and perhaps poison the audience. Katherine Kitch, as Madame, seemed nervous, and acted in a series of poses.

Susan Cole's scenery is black and a propos, as are the costumes, which cling to the maids like shrouds.