When the Carnival Ends

In New York City, conversations about social and economic inequality have proliferated in the last several years with the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011, the 2013 election of a new mayor who campaigned to end New York’s “tale of two cities,” and the increase of police brutality against economically and educationally disadvantaged people of color throughout the United States since the summer of 2014. Last fall, the theatre company Sister Sylvester entered this sociopolitical conversation with The Maids’ The Maids. Inspired by Jean Genet’s 1947 play The Maids, their ensemble performance was created and performed by New York City domestic workers along with professional actors to critique the stark imbalance of labor and power in this city, and the history of dehumanization domestic workers have experienced throughout the Western Hemisphere. The performance mixed Genet’s text with text generated by the company, delivered in Spanish, Portuguese, and English—sometimes spoken, sometimes projected as subtitles on a screen, and sometimes both. As a company, Sister Sylvester aims to address issues of power and language, and to subvert traditional forms to tell contemporary stories.

As noted in “Community Theatre: The New York Season 2013–14,” a roundtable discussion in the September 2014 issue of this journal, there is a “current interest in socially engaged performance practice,” and major New York theatre institutions like the Public have already created “specific, ongoing program[s] to address the need, or the perceived need, for this kind of performance.” The Maids’ The Maidsis certainly part of this trend. The roundtable participants suggested, through the discussion of a range of theatrical events using community members, that this strategy is more complicated than many performance practitioners at first assume. Participation is not necessarily equivalent to, nor does it automatically create, community or togetherness. The mere inclusion of untrained performers in a performance can serve to tokenize or alienate individuals and groups and close off more radical possibilities. Some questions raised in the course of this roundtable, worth considering when regarding community performers, included the following: “Are they going to be able to participate in a way that’s artistically satisfying for them and for the audience? Is their lack of training going to be used in a way that creates something beautiful or fulfilling, or where they feel they have an element of control over what they’re doing? Or is it simply being used to create an image of amateurism, where we see only the lack of proficiency and ability?” These questions were at the front my mind as I watched Sister Sylvester’s piece.

In The Maids’ The Maids, the performers use their real names: Rita and Lau, domestic workers as actors in this production, and Isa, Terrence, and Sofia, actors by trade. They frequently address the audience from the stage, enter the audience space, run through the aisles, get in individual spectators’ intimate spaces, and pressure us to engage, rather than passively watch. A Bakhtinian grotesque carnival, wherein “people replace the everyday world with a symbolic/utopian world, and the ‘truth’ of that utopian world becomes ‘a real existing force,’” ¹is created in the space of this performance as performers pick up Genet’s themes of circularity and masquerade, playfully changing costume onstage to connote gender and class differences, and circling back on the same story from different angles. This irreverent behavior, from Isa’s microphone-amplified masticating of Frito chips and raw eggs, whose remains she spits across the stage, to the dancing and singing of popular songs, creates a frenzy where the narrative voice of authority is displaced by a polyphony of voices. While this joyous feast of wise fools is captivating, there is a temporality to the carnivalesque: it exists only in windows of opportunity like this one. When the window closes, when the protests against police brutality and the occupation of spaces of oppression end, we must determine if the material conditions of inequality have been altered. Transforming our stations in life is...