When you're considering whether or not to accept a role that has been offered to you, do your personal politics enter into your decision? Particularly if you're to play a black man.

By "politics," do you mean what's going on with the government, or what's going on with the social revolution, or my politics as a human being in terms of getting work in the society? In other works, if I'm a Democrat or Republican? I don't understand what you mean, really.

If a character is purposefully written in as being black, at least in terms of where professional theatre is now, he's being used to make some point about social politics. Do you evaluate the point that is being made before you decide whether or not to take a part?

Sometimes. I really don't think I've been faced with the problem often enough for it to be a consideration. But the play that I'm doing now, The Boys in the Band. I had initially turned down. I didn't feel that the author had delineated the black man in the play carefully enough. I felt he was too weak. When I returned to the play, I told them I would be delighted to do it if they would strengthen his fight, if he wouldn't go under quite so easily.

Did they?

No, they didn't. But they changed it visually, which I hadn't anticipated. As I read the play, I saw a guy who, on top of being black, was homosexual, who was faced with a situation in an all-white, upper East Side party. He was the first and most crucial victim of the telephone game that goes on in the play, and he makes, this call, and the only thing he does then is proceedto get stoned, to get drunk, and then to pass out on the floor. Well, when I first looked at that, I thought, uh-uh. I can't make that statement. Subsequently I saw the play when they asked me to do it again. I saw, within the framework that Bob Moore [the director] had staged, how, if they would allow me to do it, by playing it differently, I could make a much stronger statement.

A black man finished a phone call, got stoned, got drunk, and passed out, and yet by the visual staging, you were able to bring him across as a character of strength?

You see, what happens is, he puts himself down all night. Other people put him down, including the most screaming queen in the play. And I thought, Jesus, I just can't do it. I'd go out of my tree doing that to myself every night. But watched it, and discovered that if put myself down more , and I do, far more than is indicated in the script-in terms of doing jokes and things in dialect-getting far more laughs out of the part than are in it, but within the framework of the play. I could come up with something.

Let's look at your more immediate work. The Blacks is clearly an important play to you; you were in it on Broadway and have chosen to direct it for the Boston Theatre Company. When you first performed in it, did it strike you as something you wanted to direct?

No. I didn't understand it when I first read it, any more than my actors, God bless them, when they first picked it up. I think they thought I'd gone crazy.

Genet gives detailed stage directions for almost every scene in the play. Have you pretty much followed them?

Yes, I have. I've tried to do it much more so than was done in the original production. Most pointedly in the fight between the white and black queens at the end. The director in New York, whose concept of the play was, I think, brilliant, didn't trust that you could let two people just talk that long. Genet's stage direction is something like "To be done like two ladies exchanging recipies." I've tried very much to get that quality into it. In New York it was done with all kinds of movement. I liked the movement, but I never thought he trusted Genet's way. I don't know, maybe it won't hold that way. We'll know with an audience.

Directions that are detailed obviously limit your prerogatives. Do you ever feel that the playwright is stepping on your toes as a director?

No. Generally my approach to the stage directions of every play is that I take them as the playwright guiding me as to what his intention was in the play. Sometimes I feel that I can do more effectively what he indicated too literally in the stage directions because he isn't an actor, he's after all a playwright. I knew this play so well in my head that I automatically followed almost all of his directions. In some places, though, he gives some stage directions that don't seem to mean anything. When I say "mean anything" they're just like dead silence, you know. And I have tried to use other techniques to fill the silence without ignoring that silence is what he meant. There's one section where the two characters that are the love interest are supposed to be whispering to each other below, and we don't hear it. This goes on for a considerable length of time. I know exactly what he means by it, and I've done it another way. I've added quite a piece of music and a "form" of pas de deux that they do instead of just remaining static. And I hope that if he saw it, he would say, "Hey, yeah, that's the kind of thing I had in mind." Though it had not occurred to him to use this particular piece of music or put a pas de deux there.

I'd like to look at the play politically. Genet seems to approach race antagonisms much more stylistically, and thus perhaps less directly, than American playwrights, like Leroi Jones, James Baldwin, and , more recently, Ed Bullins...