The maids

This is Psychic Readings Company’s version of Jean Genet’s The Maids

This is not Jean Genet’s, “The Maids”.

Genet’s play, published and produced in 1947, has found a recent resurgence on stage and is widely available in print if you’d like to read it.

Our play, The Maids, might have been Genet’s play at some point, but even the same action performed twice is not identical, let alone performed endlessly, played on loop for nearly 70 years. The rich have become richer, the poor bigger and weaker, the rituals more obscure, the fetishes further removed from their psychological, sexual and/or superstitious roots…

We don’t even know what has become of Genet’s play. We’ve lost the plot. The code to interpret the games our maids play has been rubbed smoothed by supplicating hands. Details from the game Genet set in motion have been washed away by the eternal repetition performed in a single room, in a single act. Genet’s “whirligig of being and appearance” has spun out of control, pieces of his text have flung away like accessories in a manic cosplay, and the remembrance of the outside world is failing. Gone is the milkman, the monsieur, and perhaps even the madame herself. Most disturbing of all, the maids remain. Unable to exit through death or imprisonment, the maids continue to act out their roles of servitude to a master who has long departed, leaving a power system forever rippling in the wake of her train.

photos by Dave Iden and Noah Scialom