Video Killed The Maids

A heavily Snapchat-filtered production of Jean Genet’s The Maids at St. Ann’s Warehouse uses video and mirror-like back walls to create live-feed reflections. The staging applies a dewy contemporary sheen to Genet’s harsh French cruelty, producing a gleaming white-box environment with visual associations like bridal veils, luxury retail, and beauty branding. The direction centers on dissociation through a ceremony where two maids enact master and servant roles until the servant kills the master. The approach is technically skilled and showy, but it does not fully push beyond scrolling-like mania toward more substantial revelations. The production also does not fully honor Genet’s distancing intentions, including his ideas about casting to eliminate naturalism.

"Stare too long at the reflective surface of a screen, and you can start to believe it's saying something deep back at you. That may be what's happening to the Australian director Kip Williams, who brought Sarah Snook's Picture of Dorian Gray to Broadway last year and is now leading a heavily Snapchat-filtered take on Jean Genet's The Maids at St. Ann's Warehouse."

"Williams has applied a dewy contemporary sheen to Genet's grungy French cruelty. The result's stylish and showy, set inside a gleaming, curtained white box of a set by Rosanna Vize that evokes, variously, a bridal veil, a high-end flower shop, and a haunted Glossier showroom. Fittingly for a production that uses its back walls as both a live-feed and a mirror, we get the familiar served back to us- hey, aren't we all servants to a need for likes now? -without traversing into artistic viscera."

"A need to please an audience won't get you far with Genet, who wrote the play with a distancing effect in mind. (For one, he'd suggested the parts, written as women, to be played by adolescent boys, to "eliminate nature" from the proceedings.) From the jump, The Maids engages in a whirling game of dissociation, though incompletely so in Williams's direction."

"We meet those two maids, played by the ace duo of Phia Saban and Lydia Wilson, in the midst of their "ceremony," a ritual in which they act out the roles of master and servant, up to the point where the latter kills the former. The shyer Solange"

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