Fierce and pure,
I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.
Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
Here’s the thing about Genet that nobody wants to admit at a museum opening with the wine and cheese: the motherfucker understood that we’re all whores. Not metaphorically … actually. We’re all selling some version of ourselves, some costume, some role we slip into because the alternative is admitting we’re just meat and electricity pretending the mirror means something.
And this photograph, Nathalie Brilliant as Penny, backstage, waiting, that’s the whole game right there. The moment before the lie begins. Or maybe the moment where the lie is most honest? Because backstage is where you’re neither the character nor yourself; you’re in this liminal purgatory where the costume is half-on and your face is painted but your soul is still showing through the cracks.
Genet wrote The Balcony in a prison cell, probably laughing his ass off at all of us. Bishops and judges and generals playing dress-up in a brothel while the revolution burns outside. It’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever written about power and performance and the desperate human need to believe our own bullshit.
“I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.”
Jesus. You know what that means? It means we choose the fantasy. We wake up every morning and decide which mask fits today. The fairyland isn’t some escape, it’s the only thing that’s real. Everything else is just waiting, like Penny in this photograph, for her cue to step into the light and become the gorgeous, terrible lie she’s rehearsed.