The Screens

From the acclaimed author of The Balcony: "A play of epic range, of original and devastating theatrical effect…a tidal wave of total theater" (Jack Kroll, Newsweek).

Jean Genet was one of the world's greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical work that began with Deathwatch and continued, with even bolder variations, in The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks.


A philosophical satire of colonization, military power, and morality itself, The Screens is an epic tale of despicable outcasts whose very hatefulness becomes a galvanizing force of rebellion during the Algerian War. The play's cast of over fifty characters moves through seventeen scenes, the world of the living breaching the world of the dead by means of shifting the screens—the only scenery—in a brilliant tour de force of spectacle and drama.