‘The Maids’ with Yerin Ha asks: Has life become one big show?

Kip Williams disappeared into the closet.

The face of the Australian director, the author of such theatrical sensations as “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Dracula”, suddenly appeared over the 13-foot-high mirrored front of the closet, flanked by two actresses who had previously filmed in its interior with a phone.

They rehearsed a vital, phantasmagorical sequence from Williams’ production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” and when Williams re-emerged from the wardrobe, actress Lydia Wilson rehearsed the scene. “Eternity of me! Eternity of me! Eternity of me!” she screamed in ecstasy as a kaleidoscope of pink lights streamed behind her projected image on the wardrobe.

The passage comes to an end “Maids,” which opened the show on May 17 in St. Ann’s Warehouse after last year’s run at London’s Donmar Warehouse. It encapsulates the central preoccupation of Williams’ version of Genet’s 1947 drama, which centers on two sisters, Claire (Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban), who perform daily rituals of power and submission as they dream of killing their wealthy employer, Madame (Yerin Ha).

“The phone is taking us further and further away from ourselves, from who we are and the challenge of how to express that in the world,” Williams, 39, said in an interview before the trial last week. “A world that gives you every opportunity not to be yourself.”

In this “servant,” which Williams rewrote into a contemporary idiom, hewing to Genet’s plot—and the spirit of his often stylized language—the sisters serve a 20-year-old, carefree billionaire influencer whom they both hate and adore. Claire and Solange want to kill Madame, but they also want to be Madame. As they play the changing roles of employer and servant, powerful and powerless, they are filmed trying on new faces and identities in Madam’s bedroom, filled with flowers, cream carpets and designer clothes. (“The idea of ​​capitalist femininity,” Williams said of Rosanna Vize’s set design.)

The closet scene, Williams said, was “a reference to Narnia, but I was also thinking about the scary boat ride in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and the offer of a child who has every candy he could want.” For these women, he added, the fantasy is “a world where you can have anything you want.”

Williams added that the camera may have been seen as a truth-telling device in the past. “Now it’s a way to change our reality, to provide a kind of mask, an expansion of consciousness.”

Human beings, he added, “have always had to perform a public self, but what this technology that we have now allows us to do that performance in a context that is susceptible to curation and a false version of who we are. And that creates a rift in the collective creative soul.”

Williams, who led the Sydney Theater Company from 2016-24, is known for his use of live video on stage, most notably in the hit “Dorian Gray” — in which Sarah Snook played 26 roles — and more recently in “Dracula,” where Cynthia Erivo plays nearly as many characters.

Cameramen and crew members were seen in these works; the artifice of filming the performance is declared. But in “The Maids,” Williams’ use of technology is a seamless marriage of form and function. The screens here are the screens we are familiar with; our phones, which sisters and madams constantly use to project imaginations creating images, distorted filters, augmented reality and scary colors.

“I’m aware that people tend to lump my use of technology in theater into one thing, but for me it’s always very specific to the story,” Williams said. “It was a new way to use it. Every moment of the video work is a character deciding to film themselves, and that created a style that was super playful. A lot of it came from trying to find moments for the characters to film, always motivated by their psychology.”

Filming adds another layer of complexity to the performance, Wilson said. “The characters are so articulate and the language is so dense that manipulating the phone while talking and moving was really a head-rubbing-stomach-patting thing at first.”

She offered an example of one moment in the game. “I have to double tap to change the direction of the camera; select the flash on; then change the filter from an ugly face to an angel face; then hold and slide to the left to go into film mode, then rotate it to film me and Phia, all while talking.” It’s interesting, she added, “to see what actually flies out of it because you’re so present.”

Williams said he had been interested in the play for a long time, and when he re-read it two years ago, he was struck by its prophetic nature. “The game has always been about performance and identity, but now our performances are amplified and we are voyeurs into the lives of the rich and famous,” he said. “Instagram and TikTok took what magazines did with celebrities to a whole new level.”

“Handmaids,” he added, was an opportunity to reflect on “the conundrum of today: wanting to become the thing you also want to destroy. We see these widespread social and political movements that want to overturn power and privilege, and then we’re also completely obsessed with the Met Gala.”

The game, he said, “deploys technology very deliberately to demonstrate the dangers of being seduced into this particular paradigm”.

The sisters, Saban said, “are obsessed with seeing everything through the phone; their power is to choose how to see themselves or the other. And in the performance, she added, “You’re aware of the push and pull with the audience between the screens and the stage, the intimacy and the alienation.”

For the role of Madame, Ha looked at influencers and celebrity profiles online and listened to podcasts with celebrities talking about their lives. But her recent high-profile turn in the final season of Bridgerton — and her 1.7 million Instagram followers (a mere shadow of Madame’s 28.4 million) — she says have given her deeper insight into her character.

“I understand more about her fear of abandonment, why she feels she needs to perform, the curation of herself,” Ha said. “I also understand sisters more; the love-hate relationship between you and the people you adore and are also jealous of. Each idea of ​​Madame became more embedded in my body with the experiences I had in real life.”

Williams’ last few productions have been reinterpretations of classic works, all drawn to him, he said, through “the shared tension between the desire for self-actualization, the manifestation of the desire within you, and the moral implications of pursuing that actualization. That question is now at the center of contemporary life because of the technology in which we are enmeshed.”

He added that he was often criticized for his use of screens and technology on stage. “It creates a general moral panic,” he said. “But we have to hold a mirror up to nature.