THEATER CHRONICLE
605
Anthesteria or in the medieval Carnival, with its broad jests and
I
diatribes of men with whitened faces or wearing masks. But,
accepted as fiction, the judgment, the derision, the insults become
real-they are accepted as true judgment, true derision, true
insult.
If,
in any case, the spectator, within himself or by obvious
signs, reacts to them as to a real offense, then he breaks up
the game and places himself in the wrong.
If,
on the other hand,
he pretends to regard them as fictitious, unreal, inconsequential,
he finds himself in a state of hypocrisy. He can do nothing but
I
play along accepting those words and gestures as true, and
searching in himself for the
correct
retort; that is, participating
unreservedly in the theatrical ceremony.
I
The blacks are the actors. One of them, the Coryphee,
explains this after the company, dancing to the rhythm of a
Mozart minuet, has started the performance. But the actors are
I
real Negroes. The performance that they offer to Jthe whites is a
kind of alibi to conceal something which is taking place off-stage:
a conspiracy, a betrayal, which threatens them and which in the
end they will succeed in foiling by killing the betrayer (also off–
stage). This, too, is a fiction, but, since it refers to the reality of
their revolt, it renders the play doubly unreal, making of it a
dubious and sinister game. The presence of the Negro behind the
actor is rendered explicit, the scenic fiction is exposed as an
illusion and an escape from a real, intolerable and insoluble
situation. In sum, the real truth is also on stage.
At this point Genet's goal is attained-we are truly in the
theater. Not
in
the theater of Dionysius, or in that of a court,
or in the orchestra of a bourgeois theater, but at the theater's very
origins: from one moment to the next the theatrical fiction is
transformed from a festive ritual into a liberating institution
which has as its norm the "game of truth" accepted by the
whole community. It is a moment of complete freedom. The
actors (and with them the playwright) are free to say every-
, thing, in the faith that their words will
be
accepted as true:
directed not to the fictitious individual who pretends to adhere
to the mask which he carries in life and to take it seriously, but,
beyond the mask, to the real individual: to his awareness,
