STAGE REVIEW : ‘Eh, Joe,’ ‘Maids’ Like Voices in the Head

“My executioner is whispering some love poems in my ear,” says one of the maids in Jean Genet’s “The Maids.” Consider that the theme of this sixth and final round of the Mark Taper Forum’s “50/60 Vision,” its fascinating retrospective of plays from the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Voices in the head. Absence of silence. Torment. Terror. Anguish.

In “The Maids,” second show on the bill, it is the voices of authority casting self-deprecation in the wandering minds of the servants that develops into a darkly comic, ritualistic dance of death.

In Samuel Beckett’s “Eh, Joe,” the bill’s curtain-raiser, it is the sound of a man’s inner executioner--the articulate, modulated voice of the lover he killed (or drove to her death), reminding him insidiously of his dreaded misdeeds, his gallery of dead faces, that will keep him locked forever in craven, utter isolation.

In both cases, the contest is between the real and the inescapable, the hunting and the haunting, horror swirling in “that penny-farthing hell you call your mind.”

That line is from “Eh, Joe,” a play initially written for television in 1965. We watch a man in a cell-like room, riddled with fears. We see him, but hear only the voice of his dead lover, in his head, tormenting him. Beckett wrote “Eh, Joe” for the camera, wanting it to slowly move closer and closer up, so that by play’s end, when the panic is intolerable, all you see are the man’s terrified eyes.

In director Peter C. Brosius’ transposition of this television play to the stage, he creates a similar effect by placing his actor (a shadowy Ron Campbell) behind a three-sided scrim and projecting his reactive blown-up face on each of the surfaces.

As the measured voice speaks on (in a dazzling vocal performance by the ubiquitous Angela Paton), the camera closes in on the face and the eyes, catching some of television’s impact. But as always with Beckett, the theater’s purest poet, it is ultimately the imaging words that count: bleak, repetitive, toneless, menacing yet unforced. They ring with the power of the truth they hold, “filling the silence of the grave without the maggots.”

Quite a difference from the 1947 “The Maids,” wherein Genet, by his own admission, created symbolic actors acting out impossible wish-fulfillments: The envy, rage, adoration, emulation, hatred of the powerless for the powerful.

It is open to any number of interpretations. Fellow playwright Jean-Paul Sartre had found in it connections to Genet’s first play, “Deathwatch.” Critic Martin Esslin, in his study of the Theatre of the Absurd, saw in it the foundling and convicted felon Genet’s own violent repudiation of respectability--or the revolt of Satan.

But would Genet have been prepared for director Daniel O’Connor’s Beverly Hills 1990 version? Here Madame becomes La Senora and the maids Solange and Claire become Solana and Clarita. Oh, yes. One relates to it all right.

The difference between this rather striking directorial superimposition and the more pointless one in this festival’s edition of “The Lesson” is its pertinence to this audience. And while it veers perilously close to slapstick in some of the moments with La Senora, it recovers and moves relatively unscathed to its much darker final destination. Like so many later Genet plays (“The Screens,” “The Balcony”) its emphasis remains on the ceremonial--a Black Mass wherein the maids pretend to be the mistress in order to stifle and extinguish their own unbearable feelings through ritual fantasies.

True, the production makes carne picada out of parts of the text in its effort to localize and update the play. But the spine--and the point--of the piece are not lost or diminished. Genet himself, after all, originally wanted men to play these roles in drag, heightening abstraction and grotesquerie.

Execution, too, has something to do with it. The scenes with La Senora benefit from a singularly hilarious performance from Maria O’Brien as the airhead twit, strongly supported by Karmin Murcelo’s Solana and Gloria Mann’s Clarita. Murcelo and Mann as the Latina maids carry the bulk of the play and prove they can do it. But reaction to the unscheduled deconstruction of the center scene will vary, depending on how much of a purist the viewer may be.

After some balking at the start, it worked for this viewer. As have these six uncommon evenings in the theater--the good, the not-so-good and the terrific.

At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., April 11, 17, 28, and May 11, 8 p.m.; April 15, 7:30 p.m.; matinees April 22 and May 5, 2:30 p.m.. Marathon Weekend (all 13 plays): April 7-8, 2-5:30 p.m. and 7-10:30 p.m. Ends May 11. $22-$28; (213) 972-7373, (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300, TDD (213) 680-4017).