Gender Play: The Maids — Stephen Legawiec

“I was learning how threatening gender play is for people. It’s exciting and it’s scary to see a man as a woman, because if they start believing it, there’s something wrong with them or there’s something wrong with you.”

That statement is from actor James Beaman who I directed in Jean Genet’s The Maids at the White River Theatre Festival.

Scott Richterich, James Beaman and Tina Benko

In its 90-minute running time, The Maids (which premiered in 1947) tells the story of two maids who conspire to murder their rich and glamorous mistress, whom they simultaneously worship, envy and abhor. The play is a feast of heightened language and emotions, and high drama.

It was based on a salacious, real-life story of two live-in maids, the Papin sisters, who stabbed and bludgeoned their mistress and her daughter to death in Le Mans, France in 1933. The crime was so violent that, upon discovery, their victims were unrecognizable.

Born of a prostitute, Jean Genet was in and out of prison for the first half of his life - convicted of petty theft, lewd acts and prostitution. While in prison he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, which chronicles the Parisian underworld and its mostly queer denizens. This debut novel is now considered a masterpiece. At the age of 39, Genet was finally facing life imprisonment. Valuing him as one of the most original writers of the twentieth century, a group of French intellectuals, including Sartre and Cocteau, petitioned the French president to pardon him. The president did so and Genet never returned to prison.

According to biographer Edmund White, “The legend of Genet, which he was at some pains to construct, is of a golden thug. An outcast who had been a thief, a prostitute and vagabond.”

Accustomed to years of sexual role-playing in prison, Genet came to see all identity as impermanent, malleable, and illusory.

Jean-Paul Sartre said, “The most extraordinary example of the whirligigs of being and appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in his play, The Maids. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre. He has turned dramatist because the falsehood of the stage is the most manifest and fascinating of all. Perhaps nowhere has he lied more brazenly than in The Maids.”

According to Sartre, Genet stated that he wanted the roles in The Maids to be played by men. Although it took years for that to happen, this kind of casting is common now. It seems appropriate because the play is about the shifting of identity and layers upon layers of illusion, where you never quite know what is real and what is not.

Maybe I would have cast all men if I had done the play by itself. But we did The Maids in rep with What the Butler Saw, (directed by the great Dennis Delaney). Because The Maids actors had to be in both shows, it meant that the two maids were played by men, but Madame was played by a woman (such was the casting for the rep to work). Even so, Madame was outfitted almost like a man in drag, (D.R.A.G. = Dressed As A Girl) with an exaggerated make up, hair, and womanliness. James Beaman played Solange, Scott Richterich played Claire and Tina Benko played Madame.

The maids treat Madame was a worship object.

Recently, Beaman and I talked about that experience. Early in his career, Jamie had done some performances of female impersonation, (Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich) and I assume that was why he was on my radar when I was casting the play.

Beaman’s journey to female impersonation was surprising yet inevitable.

“I’ve always been interested in acting that requires complete disguise,” Beaman said. “Transformation. I became obsessed with Lon Chaney and that Lon Chaney did all of his own make up. And I thought ‘that’s a great actor.’ You’re a magician.”

Beaman used to do an imitation of Lauren Bacall at parties and a cabaret director friend said, “Oh my God, that is hilarious. You have to do her.”

Beaman’s first response was, “Ohhh, no. I am not doing drag. Uh-uh.”

But the director wrote the show anyway and it was so good, Beaman couldn’t not do it.

Most of theatre with men playing women in the 1980s and 90s was done for laughs – Charles Busch, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger, so there was certain vogue that the Bacall performance fit into. Subsequently, Beaman was to do other drag roles in The Mystery of Irma Vep and The Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. But there was more to it than just doing drag.

Beaman wasn’t interested in the camp aspect of the performance. “I wanted to do a female character without doing a spoof,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it for comedy.”

The Maids was the perfect opportunity for that.

Beaman as Solange in tragic heroine mode

“I was interested in doing classical theatre in drag and I had that opportunity with Solange. And I also knew that Solange was a bravura role.”

Just to set the scene a little bit: The production featured a set which looked simultaneously like a museum and a crypt - with mirrors and expensive gowns circling the stage. The maids were dressed in shabby burlap dresses, like prisoners, and were made up in white face.

Beaman and Richterich contemplate their fate

The maids were also outfitted, made up, and wigged to look as much like each other as possible, as they appear to swap identities several times throughout the play.

The maids hope that Madam will drink the “tea.”

In the scene where they try to poison Madame, we put a lightbulb in a glass of tea to make the glass glow with an ominous significance. This is an effect which I stole outright from Hitchcock’s 1941 movie Suspicion, where Joan Fontaine believes that Cary Grant is trying to poison her.

The play opens with an extended scene where the maid Claire pretends to be Madame, and Solange pretends to be Claire. The fantasy is that Madame (Claire) degrades Claire (Solange), and Claire (Solange) rises up and murders Madame (Claire). I hope you could follow that… The tense dramatic arc of the play contains the question - will they have to courage to commit the murder in reality?

Beaman as Solange-playing-Claire and Richterich as Claire-playing-Madame.

“We never stressed the femaleness of it. We didn’t workshop being a woman,” said Beaman. But he credits his experience with female impersonation as one of the ways into the character. “I was exploring both the physical transformation and the imaginative psychological inquiry into a ‘female mind.’ I was also immersed in queer culture and was absorbing Genet's radical and subversive expression of it. Also, I was fascinated by Weimar and early German cinema, and I was watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and I loved the unabashed kabuki of it.”

The maids fantasize about their future glory.

Beaman said, “I don’t know if you’re aware of the challenge you presented to us as actors. You challenged me to go beyond the reason I was doing the part. It introduced me as an actor to madness. You don’t really get a chance to play madness unless you do Shakespeare. There was something visceral that happened to me as an actor, it really changed me. Because your intellectual idea only goes so far.”

Beaman-as-Solange-as-Claire beats Richterich-as-Claire-as-Madame.

“There was the whipping scene of Claire. And in rehearsal this thing came out. it was like a horror movie, like a monster. And I was afraid of it.”

“And my best friend came to see the play. We got to that scene and he was so freaked out by the physical violence of it that he pulled his legs up onto his seat. And after the show I said, ‘Are you Ok?’ And he said, ‘You really scared the f*** out of me!’ I learned on that show the power that actors can have to tap into something that is really beyond intellect.”

“I don’t know how the other actors feel, but I think It changed us as artists.”