Jean Genet’s 1947 dramatic provocation The Maids gets a new-millennium update in Kip Williams’ slick but surface-heavy new revival, now playing at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse following a run at London’s Donmar Warehouse. The Australian director is best known in New York for his video-heavy adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Sarah Snook as two dozen characters and a small battalion of videographers who followed her around a screen-filled stage that displayed both live video and prerecorded scenes.
Instead of onstage videographers, Williams here relies on his three-person cast and their smartphones to livestream portions of the action onto upstage screens that also double as oversize mirrored closet walls in the bouquet-filled bedroom of a spoiled billionaire’s daughter (Yerin Ha, of the most recent season of Bridgerton) who’s become an online influencer with 28.4 million followers. It’s there that sisters and longtime domestic servants Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) sporadically clean the place while devoting more time to trying on the couture outfits and wigs of the impossibly bratty boss identified only as Madame. (Marg Horwell designed the stylish costumes, while Rosanna Vize devised the set, lit by Jon Clark.) They also take to play-acting Madame’s casually cruel treatment of them, exaggerating the already disparate class and power disparities, intermittently remembering to bring out a vacuum or duster to make a feint at their actual job.
Wilson and Solange have great fun with these exchanges, which they amplify with livestreamed images that deploy Snapchat filters to make their plain-Jane visages appear more perfect and shareable, like Madame’s. (Zakk Hein’s video design is often ingenious.) When Ha’s Madame does turn up more than halfway through the show, she’s appropriately snappish — though not the over-the-top harridan we’ve been led to expect. It can be hard to live up to the hype.
There’s a surface polish to Williams’s revised script, which is studded with contemporary name-checks (Balenciaga, Chanel, Gucci by Ancora) as well as modern turns of phrase (“You’re really starting to give me the ick”). But beyond turning Madame into a digital celebrity and her staff into hopeless wannabes longing for online fame themselves — an idea that holds considerable visual and theatrical appeal, particularly in an opening scene performed behind a wraparaound gauze curtain — Williams seems uninterested in exploring Genet’s other weightier themes. Yes, there’s a class and power dynamic here — but Williams soft-pedals the homoerotic undertones of the story as well as the sisters’ long-fantasized idea of offing their mistress with a poisoned cup of tea. (Another Australian, Andrew Upton, took a different approach in an adaptation he brought to New York in 2014 featuring Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert, and Elizabeth Debicki.)
Genet had loosely based the characters on real maids who murdered their mistress and her grown daughter in 1933. In the Frenchman’s Brechtian reconception, the sisters rehearse an attempted homicide in an elaborate and recurring ritual involving dress-up, pyscho-sexual gamesmanship, and much raunchy perversity. But Ha’s Madame doesn’t seem like a strong candidate for murderous revenge — she’s less a villainous one-percenter than the caricature of a narcissistic nepo baby with a mean streak. Meanwhile, Saban and Wilson’s sisters seem so deeply absorbed in their fantasy life, which seems to boost their serotonin levels if not their online likes, that poisoning Madame seems beside the point. Why risk prison committing real crimes when you can while away your days playing a fantasy version of a first-person shooter game?
Without the threat of real violence, Williams’s The Maids gets stuck in its admittedly pretty surfaces. For a while, that’s more than enough to keep us engaged. Wilson and Saban maintain a laser focus through their ritualistic routines while adroitly recording their movements with iPhones (and adding filters in real time). By the end, Wilson’s Claire dons a designer gown and metallic wig while meeting her daily step-count goal on an offstage treadmill. I’m not sure what it has to do with Genet, but the commitment is admirable. ★★★☆☆
THE MAIDS
St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 14 for $49 to $149