Jean Genet’s Deathwatch explores power and acceptance from the perspective of a prison cell. Three criminals, Green-Eyes, Lefranc, and Maurice, have all failed to measure up to society’s moral standards by committing crimes. Now in prison, these three individuals must measure themselves against the different standards of an institution where morality is flipped and criminality reigns supreme. Status and power is awarded by severity of crime and dismissal of traditional values like love and companionship in favor of mistrust and betrayal. The prisoners struggle to name—or in Lefranc’s case become—the ultimate criminal and the king of the prison. This struggle raises important questions: can one choose to become the ultimate criminal? or is criminality an unavoidable fate to be accepted? To suggest answers to these questions, Genet uses the bars of a prison cell as a brutal frame for criminality, misfortune, and otherness.
Our production aims to highlight the nature of the Other (those who are different) in the US by exploring criminals as the ultimate Others. In a society that values law, order, friendship/kinship, kindness, and good; the Other will value criminality, disorder, isolation, betrayal, and evil. If society defines the One as white, cis-gendered, male, heterosexual, etc.; those who do not fit into that mold experience some degree of Otherness. Black is the Other of white, transgendered is the Other of cis-gendered, female is the Other of male, homosexual is the other of heterosexual, and so on. To answer the above stated question—if criminality is an unavoidable fate—our production imagines a spectrum between the One (society) and the Other (the exact opposite), and proposes that individuals who fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two, spurred by an innate need to belong, might be forced to accept complete Otherness. If one of the above Others cannot find acceptance in society because they do not fit the picture of the One, they may feel compelled to find acceptance as the ultimate Other – adopting inverse morals. The production will showcase the prison cell as the home of the ultimate Other and explore Green-Eyes, Lefranc, and Maurice’s journey to belong in that world.
By presenting this work through the lense of modern United States’ institution of mass incarceration and the prison-poverty cycle, our team aims to suggest US society’s role in the creation of criminal and draw an eerie parallel between the ideology of Genet’s prisoners and the ideology of minorities in the US about their own misfortune. We specifically highlight Lefranc’s mental and physical journey toward complete Otherness. The production unfolds as if it is a dream in which Lefranc moves from idolizing the ultimate criminals to becoming one himself. Lefranc wakes from his dream and suddenly he is no longer in a cell, but in his room and claims “I really am all alone”. Taking this poignant statement outside of the prison evokes his isolation while still in the midst of society, not just when he is removed from it — a moment that may eerily resemble the status and/or circumstances of many individuals in our society.
