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PLAYING WITH GENET'S BALCONY: LOOKING BACK ON A 1 9 7 9 / 1 9 8 0 PRODUCTION The poison of the commercial theater has so soaked into our ways of thinking that even an experimental production is regarded as a success or a failure. The show either makes it at the box office, with critics, by word of mouth, or it is sent away defeated. "Forget about it," people say, "and go on to the next thing." This is a stupid way of advancing theatrical thought, for why can't a work be neither a success nor a failure but a step along the way, an event that yields some interesting data? In other words, though entertainment values are truly important in the theater, they are not the only values. And those devoted to experimentation need to be particularly rigorous in separating out from each work what is useful, regardless of the overall "success" of the project. I don't think that this is a fancy rationalization for my production of The Balcony in 1979/80. This production was the last I did with the The Performance Group, and there were many problems with the show, some of them relating to the fact that my relationship with members of TPG was strained. The production went through several phases. First, there were audition workshops in February/March 1979. These were necessary because only a fraction of the people in TPG wanted to work on The Balcony. Many people were B E T W E E N T H E A T E R A N D A N T H R O P O L O G Y 262 involved with Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray in their work on Point Judith; other longtime members of The Group had left and were trying their skills elsewhere; I myself was ambivalent about whether to stay in TPG, quit directing for a while, or start another theater group. Anyway, I decided to audition new people, thinking I would work independently with them, later either integrating them into TPGor starting a new group. At worst, they would be fun to work with on a single production. Performance Group members Ron Vawter, SpaldingGray, Willem Dafoe, and Libby Howes—most are still active in The Group—wanted to work on The Balcony. But—and this is a decisive but—they wanted to work with LeCompte on Point Judith too. Directors, like the Old Testament God, are jealous and want no other directors before them: thus, conflict, tension, and unhappiness. Besides, TPG members did not participate in the workshops, except sporadically, during the spring of 1979. And TPG member Stephen Borst—who was not working with LeCompte and who played the Police Chief in TheBalcony—also participated only occasionally in the workshops. So I found myself becoming more and more deeply involved with seven new people. Throughout several months of intense workshops, we investigated together sexual and power fantasies, psychophysical exercises (the core of "traditional" TPG training; see Schechner 1973^), vocal work emphasizing breathing, and yoga taught by a man who had studied in India with the son of my yoga teacher. This kind of work went on from March through May 1979. Then I went away to Connecticut College, where I ran a student workshop. Assisting me were Borst, Vawter, and Carol Martin (a dancerchoreographer specializing in ideokinesis, a body imaging and movement technique). With the students we built a version of The Balcony that included much double casting; for example, four different people played Irma, depending on the scene. The summer work was successful insofar as it finalized the text: I had been working with Jean-Jacques Thomas and Alexander Alland in retranslating it, collating the several French versions Genet had published. The Connecticut College production also gave me a handle on how I wanted the production in New York to be. But then, in the fall of 1979 during actual rehearsals in the Performing Garage, all the problems implicit in the split way of working became manifest. Saskia Noordhoek-Hegt, an extraordinarily powerful performer, joined the company to play the Judge; Gray came in to do the Bishop; Vawter worked during the summer and fall on Irma but still had to divide his time between LeCompte and me (as did Gray, as well as Dafoe, who played Arthur, and Howes, who played Carmen). Tensions rose on all fronts. The people I'd worked with during the spring approached their roles through living inside...

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