The blacks : a clown show / by Jean Genet; translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman.

This text contains black and white photographs which depict the first American performance of The Blacks on May 4, 1961 at St. Mark's Playhouse in New York. A cast list of the original American cast is included.

This text is a play script and does not contain a table of contents.

"A sensational success at its first Paris performance in October, 1959, this latest of Genet's plays in an amazing symbolic drama probing the baffling enigma of reality and appearance, as startling on the printed page as it is on the stage. In a play within a play, "a group of colored players enacts before a jury of white-masked Negroes - representing in caricature a missionary bishop, an island governor general, a haughty queen and her dwarf lackey - the ritualistic murder of a white of which they have been accused. When they have played out their weird and gruesome crime they turn on their judges and condemn them to death. Then - with polite adiuex to the spectators - they dance with 18th-century elegance a Mozart minuet, with which the play began." -- From the book jacket.