Genet's best known play, The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel (RIP), had the longest off-Broadway run of any straight play in the 1960s. The Balcony, too, has a notable history that includes (after various international bannings) a 1960 Peter Brook production in Paris and a New York debut at Circle in the Square, which starred Nancy Marchand and Sylvia Miles. While it is interesting as a psychological study and says something about its times, as drama it's lacking.
The Blacks was, after The Balcony, the second of Genet's plays to be staged in New York. The production was the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade. Originally premiered in Paris in 1959, this 1961 New York production ran for 1,408 performances. The original cast featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone.
Genet wrote the first version of the play between January and September 1955, during which time he also wrote The Blacks and re-worked his screenplay The Penal Colony.[13] Immediately afterwards, in October and November the same year, he wrote Her, a posthumously published one-act play about the Pope, which is related to The Balcony.[14] Genet took his initial inspiration for The Balcony from Franco's Spain, explaining in a 1957 article that:
To the extent that realism is understood as the effort to bring to light the essential relationships that at a particular moment govern both the development of the whole of social relations and—through the latter—the development of individual destinies and the psychological life of individuals, Goldmann argues that The Balcony has a realist structure and characterises Genet as a very great realist author :[61]
