(re) membering the balcony—a response in 9 associations

1. 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]

2. 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]

3. 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]

4. 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]

5. 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.

6. 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]

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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 23^rd, 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.