tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE's Reviews > The Screens

Like most Genet that I've read, it was so long ago (although I think I probably read this one much more recently) that I barely remember it. I remember its only scenery being screens. Genet, always political, does something that always interests me: he makes explicit political commentary at the same time that he manages to transcend the obvious w/ a higher formal level. Just as he used role-playing in The Balcony to unhinge the fixedness of people's role-playing in daily life, here I interpret his use of screens as a meta-device for partitioning off different levels of 'reality'. Just as in math, "grouping" can be used to determine whether an infinite series equals 1 or 0, here screens can be used to partition off matters of life & death & make them more ambiguous w/o taking away the hard study that Genet makes of them.