In the 1950s in Paris, Sarah Maldoror helped form the first all-Black theater company, Les Griots, notable for giving substantial roles to Black performers in plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire, and Alexander Pushkin and for premiering Jean Genet’s Les Nègres (The Blacks) to great success and controversy in 1959. Genet intended the play—a “clowning” of Black stereotypes, as the subtitle suggests—to be performed by African and Caribbean actors for an exclusively white audience. The Griots production, directed by Roger Blin, must have been a shock to theatergoers habituated for so long to taking these grotesque images of Black inferiority for granted, perhaps even relishing in them. This special screening features a live reading of a provocative interview, “The Queen of the Blacks Speaks to You about Whites,” that Maldoror conducted with the writer Marguerite Duras at the time of the Paris staging. Following this, to offer some context, we present an archival recording of Robert Wilson’s own interpretation of Genet’s Les Nègres, which premiered in 2015 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris more than a half century later.
The reading of the interview (translated by Louise Bertin) will be performed by the Obie Award-winning actress April Matthis (The Piano Lesson, Toni Stone, Mary Jane) and the Emmy Award-winning actress Tina Benko (The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage, The Rehearsal).