Most Harvard theatregoers remember at least one night when they stood outside the entrance door to a house production at 8:45 on opening night, waiting for a scared cast to finish its final dress rehearsal, five minutes prior to repeating it all in front of their first audience. Robert Ginn's ambitious, technically complex, production of Jean Genet's The Balcony never even made it through that all-important final run-through, and suffered consequently from an almost total absence of pacing on opening night (it ran approximately three and three-quarter hours). Undaunted, Ginn has over the week-end edited some of the more repetitious sections of Genet's troubled text, and subsequent performances promise to demand less of its audience in return for somewhat more of a polished presentation.

I say all this out of good conscience because I found the opening night of The Balcony mannered, irritating, and interminable. Now subjective judgments don't mean a hell of a lot, particularly from the none-too-enlightened critics of the Harvard Summer News, particularly with a play as ambiguous and difficult as The Balcony. But one or two impressions spring to mind.

The novels and films of Genet which discuss homosexuality create a mystique stressing physical strength and masculinity, ignoring the feminine mannerisms we associate with theatrical homosexual archetype: his lyrical phallic montage, Un Chant D'Amour; is in its own strange fashion one of the most intense statements of masculine potency on film. While Genet assaults his audience with one or another shocking perversion, he is also telling them that abnormality does not, in the last analysis, exist and sexual perversion, regardless of its nature, is as divine a form of love as those more commonly sanctioned.

Ginn's production employs more conventional mystiques, making simple and obvious reversals of sexual roles: Madame Irma's "visitors" are played as vain effeminates, sexless transvestites who, when gathered together in the last act, remind one of the opening of Macbeth played in drag. Similarly, Irma is conceived as the Madam of an answering service, a nervous dike devoid of femininity and consequent feminine insight. This is supported by the text often, particularly in the dialogue with Carmen, but it annihilates any credibility to her stated relationship with Georges, the chief of police. Genet's contradictions work better set in a world where men are more-or-less men and women women; when the men are made effeminate and the women overly masculine, the text appears too-soon banal, the action singularly purposeless. The actors in the Balcony are always pawing at one another, an inadequate substitute for the guts in Gent's work.

Ginn has perhaps made a mistake in directing such a cold play in emotional high-style, emphasizing spectacle with aluminized mylar sheets mirroring the audience, incense burning-away, and bits and pieces of Artaud and Grand Guignol. The set, grotesque caryatids awesomely conceived and executed by Sebastian Melmoth, nonetheless serves little intrinsic function in Ginn's concept, appearing only as so much lavish decoration surrounding the playing area. The costumes and lighting, however, work better, and are superb as only the Loeb can make them.

Performances employed more acting mannerisms than acting, and even Daniel Seltzer as Georges used more vocal and physical tricks than this excellent and accomplished actor has ever displayed. Susan Lyke plays Irma at a fever pitch, unmodulated and quickly uninteresting, as was Janet Bowes as a listless Carmen. Michael McKean did the Envoy with excellent comic precision, although by playing it gay he threw the production over the edge, as far as this reviewer was concerned. Only Lisa Kelley successfully conveyed something of the balances and conflicts in Genet's many strange worlds. But as Chantal the revolutionary she comes on late and, on opening night, the battle had been lost long before.