for all prisoners of love
ACT I
FADE TO BLACK:
FADE TO MOVIE SCREEN DISPLAYING BALCONY:
we open on a man in his thirties standing on the balcony, he looks out at the city as fairy lights twinkle in his eyes and all over frame. the audience is becoming restless — they want blood. the man turns to us, staring down the camera with a smile.
BALCONY
No balcony.
there is no longer a balcony, the man falls through the flags of denmark, canada, england and mexico. the audience cheers — the man is only to be saved by a large pile of dollars. he pats himself to be sure he is not hurt then gets up and walks away to: a scorched new york — the audience boos but also gives a standing ovation as we see our film screen getting bigger and bigger: “THE END” it proclaims.
BALCONY
No balcony.
WE FADE TO BLACK:
ACT II CONTRA LE BALCON
Soundtrack: Pigeons Are Black Doves (2017, Cauleen Smith)
Word-images projected onto La Isla de Manhattan:
 |
SARS-CoV-2 like snowflakes or
dust motes or Mardi Gras
beads unstrung ash
falling tiny planets
orbit a Xmas tree
ornaments lit up
in a window across the
street (catty
corner
north by northeast)
|
As the sun sets, families roost on balconies. Like pigeons. Unlike pigeons. They flock to the cheering, pounding pots and pans with the backs of wooden spoons.
Photographer #1 (click, cluck):
Merciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Horns honk (solidarity sans PPE).
Photographer #2 (casi unx cacerolerx; six degrees____________six feet of separation):
Reality, TV?! “Who was that unmasked Man?!”
The numbers (“What a roaring!”):
Chorus: Twinkle, twinkle,
as Empire is to State,
allusion is to illusion.
“The beginning is near.”
Dum, dum.
TAN, TAN
ACT III
Scene 1:
[From somewhere in the hot zone]
The Balcony stares at the high tower of Empire with its constantly shifting candy-colored dreams. Is the Empire attempting to communicate its state of needs, its state of reclining beyond the unknown unknown, its antenna calling forth tik-tok-ing times that touch the empty but deep blue sky, as if trying to remember something it has lost or never really had?
Time to take our tempo-sure!
We Zapatistas have always worn our masks.
To cover ourselves from the spittle of Empire states.
Scene 2:
[The Balcony stands and sings]
Stop plaguing me with your faulty questions, stop plaguing me with your aping power demands, stop plaguing me with your overreaching wildfires and flaming fake-outs. Apocalypse was worth a smoke once. Now even that song is no longer worth the transmission it came in on:
Oh Empire, Oh Empire(s), your just-in-time scales don’t make a lick of sense now, or even then, or the day after tomorrow. You are just another care-worn virus too ill even to infect itself.
[A very long Pinter pause]
Scene 3:
[The Balcony whispers to the balcony next door]
We are all related to tinny-tiny-things that touch-us-with-out-us; they are more us than we are. We sing of the body eclectic and await our self-imposed care to open our doors, our pots and pans, our hallways, our codes, our slow drifts, our contagious etymologies:
care (v)
Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,” from Proto-Germanic *karo- “lament,” hence “grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon karon “to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain,” Old High German charon “complain, lament,” Gothic karon “be anxious”), said to be from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream” (source also of Irish gairm “shout, cry, call;” see garrulous).
Scene 4:
[The Balcony washing its hands while singing: “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”]
No matter what orange stupidities crawl out of Empire’s faulty towers trumpeting.
We Dis(c)obedience dal balcones will continue to become attuned to other colors out of space beyond your Empire’s overreaching quarantinas-without-vision.
We Balconies will continue to sing our endless songs, our revolutionary shouts and pings:
“Other worlds are possible even in impossible times!”
(re) membering the balcony—a response in 9 associations
- The Other Balcony per Genet is not the first time Marcos has appeared in a production of the Balcony. It was in 1986. That was the year Joanne Akalaitis directed a production of the play “set in Latin America,” including a character of the same name. Her production was inspired by a 1984 visit to a maternity hospital in a former bordello run by the police for general Somoza. She ultimately hired Ruben Blades to write the soundtrack. Akalaitis’ rather misguided “Pan-Latinamericanism” aside, her performance leaned into the scenes of revolution, restoring some of the political content that was often excised.[i]
- Akalaitis’ production was roundly critiqued. Her choices seem to have failed to make evil explode on stage because they satirized a satire.[ii] Frank Rich was particularly disappointed by the production’s gesture to Latin America. Perhaps reacting to the program note that cites conditions in El Salvador, he writes: “Genet’s extraordinary work, written in 1956 and ageless, reaches a shocking nihilistic crescendo that completely obliterates a director’s parochial agenda; it’s a play that bites off history in 2,000-year cycles, not in passing headlines.”[iii]
- But passing headlines were important. 1986 was the year that Reagan gave a famous speech justifying aiding rebels against the leftist Sandinista government, which had previously overthrown General Somoza, a dictator who had for a time been propped up by the US.[iv] It was also the year that Reagan’s US Surgeon General published the first report on AIDS. A year away from AZT and the birth of Act Up, the death count by the end of the year was 24,559.[v]
- The Dominguez-Carroll production of The Balcony notably calls this play a play without distance. They resist abstraction by listing the demographics of COVID deaths in the US and literally collapsing the balcony as a stage for the theatrical possibilities of contemporary Fascism. It should be noted that Genet’s inspiration for The Balcony was the regime of Francisco Franco and the mausoleum in the play was based on one for Franco. No distance; no abstraction.[vi]
- It is clear that Genet’s play explores the dynamics of Fascism, but today, might this play also speak to the rhetorical strategies that link anti-democratic populism and Fascism under the most savage of capitalisms? Today, catering to a politics of resentment, male charismatic leaders pit the people against the elite without any structural analysis that would reveal the real conditions of oppression, or a truly liberational discourse. One must only review the end of The Balcony’s scene 7 — where Mark’s authoritarianism and desire to “write a poem to the glory of wrath, rebellion and war” overwrites Roger’s desire for a poem hailing “freedom, the people and their virtue” — to see the mechanics of a dangerous turn.[vii] Their femme heroine, it should be noted, is conspicuously absent.
- Benjamin Moffitt lays bare the faux antagonism between the media and populist leaders in our contemporary moment when he states: “Although populist actors often claim to hate the media….we know that this is empirically not true. Some of the most successful cases of populism in recent years have come from leaders who literally own or control the media.” And later: The hatred of the media that populist leaders often profess is thus perhaps better acknowledged as hatred of the media that opposed them or is critical of them.[viii]
- It should be noted that the history of populism in the Americas is deeply entwined with the history of the balcony. The balcony of Evita Peron’s casa rosada is ground zero of populist imagining that sutures elite actors (en los dos sentidos) to the affective loyalty of los de abajo—a perhaps noble impulse gone horribly wrong. But in the Dominguez-Carroll world, the balconies reject the lies of media. Can this imagined theatre be a way out? I hope so.
- And what of the tactics of revolutionaries and their co-option? The cacerolerx is a way to say no when words are not working or cannot be said. Remember: Chile, Montreal, Argentina, amongst others. Today, the banging of pots and pans are greetings for nurses and health care workers being sent to slaughter as they care for the victims of a genocidaire. I detect an irony in “casi unx cacerolerx,” and it stings. This play recognizes “the explosion of evil” as a present reality.
- But to return. Genet’s play ends in post-revolutionary regression and the offstage sound of machine gun fire. The Other Balcony per Genet does not. Instead it ends with subcomandante Marcos’s words: “Other worlds are possible, even in impossible times.” And that is where I will end, too.
[i] See Andrea J. Noureyh, “Joanne Akalaitis: Post Modern Director or Socio-Social Critic,” Theatre Topics, 1.2 ( Sept. 1991): 183.
[ii] See Barbara Rugen, “Rev. of The Balcony,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 38.4 (December 1986), 473-475, Arthur Holmberg, “Rev. of The Balcony,” Performing Arts Journal, Vol 10.1 (1986): 43-46, Frank Rich, “Theater: The Balconey at Harvard,” New York Times, January 23rd, 1986: C19, and Alan Bunce, “Circus-like Production of the ‘Balcony’ dilutes Genet’s ironies.” Christian Science Monitor. March 4, 1986. Accessed online.
[iii] Rich, C19. Rugen comments on the program note on page 474 of her review.
[iv] The Transcript of Reagan’s speech was printed in the New York Times. March 17. 1986: A12.
[v] Statistics are available on the AMFAR website. Accessed May 28, 2020 at https://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/
[vi] This anecdote is well known, but can be found in Jeannette L. Savona, Jean Genet. London: Macmillan Press, 1983: 77.
[vii] Cite Jean Genet, The Balcony, translated by Bernard Frechtman, in Nine Plays for the American Theatre, edited and with an introduction by Harold Clurman. New York: Grove Press, 1981: 351.
[viii] See Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford U Press, 81-82.