lHEATE,R CHRONICLE
JEAN GENET , WHITE AND BLACK
Jean Genet has defined his play,
L es Negres,*
as a
clownerie.
It is a free improvisation on the theme of the relations
between blacks and whites. · The true action concerns the contrast
between the two kinds of men. Stanislavski would have described
it by saying: "To discover what a Negro is." What's more, the
text by its very nature demands that it be acted: if it were reduced
to the written word, something essential would be missing, which
is that it constitutes the plot of an action to be performed above
all .before an audience; And the action to be performed is the
contrast between blacks and whites. So what is at stake is theater
conceived truly as such. In fact, even if Genet has never read
PirandeIlo,
Les N egres
is the happiest example of the resumption
and continuation of the form of theater initiated by Pirandello
with
Six Characters in Search of an Author
and prolonged by
him (in a manner which, however, was uncertain, since too
programmatic)
in
such plays as
Tonight We Improvise
and
Each In His Own Way.
As so often with inspired inventors, after
Six CharacterJ
Pirandello became a prisoner of his own invention: he understood
it as an ideology and employed it as a technique. He did not
realize that what he had discovered was not so much a way of
making scenically apparent the illusion-reality dialectic as a path
for returning the dramatic situation and the theater to their
original freedom. Indeed, in the modern theater, this freedom
was regained when Ibsen put in question the morality of the
comedy which the individual acts out in order to adapt himself
to society. In Pirandello, what is
in
question is the very reality
of the role that the individual realistically acts out in everyday
life; at the end what one discclVers is that one cannot avoid
*
Nicola Chiaromonte's remarks are based on the Paris production.
