Los Biombos/The Screens (review)

Guarda (Maria Simental) and Malika (Sylvia Cabada) in Cornerstone Theater Company of Los Angeles’s production of Jean Genet’s Los Biombos/The Screens, directed by Peter Sellars. East Los Angeles Skills Center. Photo: Lynn Jeffries.

Los Angeles’s production of Jean Genet’s Los Biombos/The Screens, directed by Peter Sellars. East Los Angeles Skills Center. Photo: Lynn Jeffries.

Audience and company members in Cornerstone Theater Company of Los Angeles’s production of Jean Genet’s Los Biombos/The Screens, directed by Peter Sellars. East Los Angeles Skills Center. Photo: Lynn Jeffries.

Productions of Jean Genet’s The Screens surface infrequently, due to the challenges it presents to theatre artists and audiences alike. Staged recently in Los Angeles as a collaborative effort, Los Biombos/The Screens dealt with these challenges obtusely rather than directly. The collaboration between LA’s Cornerstone Theater (in its twelfth year of productions), director Peter Sellars, and the Chicano and Latino communities of East LA came billed as “an epic Boyle Heights happening.” Subtitled the “Boyle Heights segment” of Cornerstone’s “Four BH’s of Los Angeles” (the others being Baldwin Hills, Broadway/Hill, and Beverly Hills), this effort originated in Cornerstone’s commitment to create a multicultural and community-oriented theatre reflecting the cultural diversity of Southern California. Peter Sellars brought to this project his talent for exasperating audiences and his profile as one of America’s most visible directors.

A cast of mostly beginning actors from the Boyle Heights neighborhood and a handful of Cornerstone regulars attempted to transform and contemporize Genet’s work. The 1966 original created a Shakespearean tale out of Algeria’s war for independence from French rule, gravitating around themes of death, isolation, prejudice, and Genet’s world of glorified abjection. By relocating this sprawling and phantasmagoric epic, the ensemble articulated their experience of the LA riots, as viewed through the lens of Genet’s play.

The performance space on the second level of the East LA Skill Center furnished ample opportunities for exploring Los Biombos/The Screens. The wide and deep environmental space with ghostly white beams and electrical wires hanging from the ceiling provided an adaptable and foreboding performance space. The resulting design by Cornerstone’s Lynn Jeffries, however, never took advantage of this setting. While spreading the play over the expansive area, the performance failed to inscribe the space with any apparent or cohesive meaning. Scene followed scene randomly, with little apparent intent other than shuffling the audience around the warehouse. Jeffries’s design evoked a worn, pared-down realism except for a few scenes in which TV screens and an illuminated monolith lended a technological appeal to the proceedings. This relatively unimaginative utilization of the set flattened the script’s inherent poetic imagery into a more ascetic and muted mise-en-scène. Jeffries occasionally created alluring visuals by using the depths of the warehouse, but generally she kept with a minimum of set elements: a few pieces of furniture, cartoon-like screens, and the construction site atmosphere provided by the warehouse setting.

The artist Gronk provided the eponymous screens, consisting of large paintings carried in and out of the scenes. Although visually satisfying when considered individually, the screens contributed little more than a superficial commentary on the scenes. Genet’s poetic yet visceral setting called for screens that functioned as transformative stage elements. Gronk’s creations never really came alive; they did not demarcate the numinous passage between the living and the dead nor did they function as sites of concealment. Given the presence of the spray paint artists Nuke and Chaka, there should have been little problem in integrating the screens as active components of the production.

As the visual aspects stalled in a muted minimalism, so the acting failed to achieve the extremely high levels of commitment, physicality, and...