Two 1940s French masterpieces to run this weekend
Translated from the French “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s witticism “Hell is other people,” is one of those quotes that’s achieved a fame well beyond that of its source material. A new production of Sartre’s 1944 play Huis Clos or No Exit by the fledgling Electric City Repertory Company opened last weekend at the Phoenix Performing Arts Centre in Duryea under the direction of Paul J. Gallo, and continues this weekend. It finds a cowardly army deserter, a lesbian postal worker, and a high-society gold digger escorted to a drawing room by a mysterious valet. The trio, we glean, is damned and this is hell, or at least its waiting room. None is eager to admit his/her wrongs but after some arguing over the circumstances of their predicament, they decide to confess to their crimes.
Sixty some miles away at NACL Theatre in Highland Lake in New York on Saturday, Kicking Mule Theatre Company will present its adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 play The Maids under the direction of Francine Roussel. The director is an associate professor of theatre at Muhlenberg College and holds M.A. degrees from the University of Paris, La Sorbonne, in both modern European and classical French literature. From NACL, she will be taking the production to Philly Fringe in September.
To say that Sartre and Genet were contemporaries is a gross understatement. The son of a prostitute put up for adoption when he was still an infant, Genet was a juvenile delinquent who spent his early adult years in and out of prison on charges of indecency, lewd conduct (i.e. homosexual acts), vagrancy and petty theft. He began writing in prison and would go on to impress the likes of Jean Cocteau and find friends in contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso as well as Sartre.
After first basing a character on Genet — Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord, a ruthless militant who transforms from war criminal to a do-gooder — Sartre wrote a hefty exploration of the man titled Saint Genet in 1952. It’s said that the treatise so profoundly moved its subject that he did not write for five years after reading it. In it, Sartre describes The Maids as offering “the most extraordinary examples of the whirligig of bring and appearance, of the imaginary and the real.” A work about power, class, and the roles we play, The Maids is based on the story of the infamous Papin sisters charged with murdering their employer and her daughter.
Both the victim and the maids, Solange and Claire, are meant to be performed by male actors. The same artificiality of theatre that attracted Genet to the art form in the first place, reasoned Sartre, is what leads him to ask the women be portrayed by young men.
“By virtue of being false,” the philosopher wrote, “the woman acquired a poetic density,” he wrote, further describing the domestics as “others,” outcasts created by their masters.
“When we see Solange and Claire in the presence of Madame, they do not seem real. Fake submission, fake tenderness, fake respect, fake gratitude. Their entire behavior is a lie.”
No Exit continues with shows Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. before closing on Sunday with a matinee at 2 p.m. The cast includes Andrew Gruden as Garcin, Shaun Pierre as the Valet, Margaret Walther as Inez, and Julia Rudolf as Estelle. All tickets are $10. Call 457-3589 for reservations. The Maids plays Saturday at 7 p.m. only. Tickets are $15 to $25 (sliding scale) call (845) 557-0694 for reservations or visit www.nacl.org for more information.
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