The Screens
Jean Genet was one of the world's greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical work that began with Deathwatch and continued, with even bolder variations, in The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks.Explicitly political, The Screens is set within the context of the Algerian War. The play's cast of over fifty characters moves through seventeen scenes, the world of the living breaching the world of the dead by means of shifting the screens--the only scenery--in a brilliant tour de force of spectacle and drama."Only a true poet, a man possessed of verbally imagined artistry, could write such a play as The Screens.... [It] reveals a fabulous theatrical imagination, a joy in the creation of stage hyperbole."--Harold Clurman, The Nation"A play of epic range, of original and devastating theatrical effect...a tidal wave of total theater."--Jack Kroll, Newsweek"A shocking, brutal, but magnificently dramatic and human work...a culmination of everything Genet has done."--Roger BlinJean Genet (1910­1986), an orphan, grew up in a life of crime. He wrote his first novel while serving one of numerous prison sentences for stealing, begging, and smuggling. In 1948 he was condemned to life imprisonment but was pardoned by the president of France at the behest of the country's most eminent writers. Among his most notable works are the novels Our Lady of the Flowers, The Thief's Journal, Funeral Rites, The Miracle of the Rose, and Querelle. Genet was one of the first writers to openly avow his homosexuality and criminality as legitimate literary subjects, creating in his works the hero-criminal and hero-homosexual.