Sink Into Psychosexual Absurdity

Anyone remember Westworld?

In the HBO series’ futuristic setting, people could purchase immersive themed experiences, like a wild Western adventure filled with automatons customers could harass and harm to their hearts’ content. An artificial world filled with artificial people, but driven by actions fueled by intense emotions. 

I kept thinking about it while watching Mad Cat Theatre and Dirty Gold Theatre’s production of The Maids. Something about the layers of deception in Jean Genet’s 1947 script struck a similar chord in my brain. Everything in the Bernard Frechtman translation of Genet’s absurdist play seems primed to challenge concepts of reality. The audience initially sees Claire (Allison Paranka) as a domineering mistress verbally abusing her submissive servant, Solange (Maddie Scanlan). Soon we learn both are actually maids – sisters taking turns slipping on the persona of their Madame (Angelina Castillo). Such roleplay is the only opportunity the siblings get to act out dreams of ritualistic murder, fantasies of freedom tinged with violent sexual deviance. 

Genet himself dwelt at the fringes of society. His work, including The Maids, finds people acting outside social norms, feeling perverse pleasure in the pain and punishment of everyday life. What is “right” in a world that accepts war and mass destruction? Are the niceties of society actually worth anything? Why not indulge in the face of nothingness? It’s the written equivalent of a Pollock painting, throwing everything at the wall, deciphering meaning through chaos. 

Basically, adapting this work isn’t for the faint of heart.

Mad Cat and Dirty Gold’s production mostly highlights slinky sexual taboos. Shades of Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary come to mind when Scanlan crawls onstage with kneepads and a silky slip, frilly apron and shrinking demeanor signaling submission while her eyes burn with want. Scanlan keeps a curved spine throughout, but meaning shifts. Is she bent in submission, or ready to pounce? It depends. As for Paranka, she serves as the signpost for shifting realities, dropping her voice from swanning superior to nervous ninny in seconds. Both exude desire. For Madame’s approval, or her riches, or her death.

It took longer for the story’s class tension to fully sink into my consciousness. Once Castillo’s beautifully unhinged Madame hits the stage with her tempestuous nature and barely veiled disgust, the sisters’ devolution into playacting hits harder. More pathetically. It’s easier to be affected by their attempts to grasp for control over their lives. They are stuck serving an unsteady master, in cycles of poverty and abuse. Scanlan and Paranka’s second round of pretend power offers a quick flash of that deeper meaning, of depth that could be unearthed from the rubble of the script. But it soon moves back to false vindication, without fully exonerating the faint whiff of artifice. 

Back in the late 2010s, I only made it through two or three episodes of Westworld. After the pilot, my brain decided every character was secretly a robot. And if every character was a robot, a being that could be programmed and resurrected at will, then why should I care about their fates? Listen, I know a lot of people were invested in the show. But for me, knowing a character-wipe-and-reboot could be around any corner lowered the stakes.

The layers of absurdity shown in The Maids felt similar. The characters’ charade meant that anything and everything could be an elaborate ruse. For some, that could remove any bite from the events. But for others, peeling back false facades could be thrilling. 

This article appears in August 14 • 2026.