THE MAIDS: Messy Maximalism in Kip Williams’ Latest Multi-Cam Experiment – Review

Kip Williams, whose frenetic, multi-cam take on The Picture of Dorian Gray last year was a genuine Broadway must-see, opens the script for his adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids with a quippy epigraph from Oscar Wilde: “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” The sentiment represents the style of inventive queer maximalism, compressed into a capsule-bursting dose, that made Williams’ Dorian Gray so thrilling to watch, on top of its perfect paralleling of the original’s Victorian vanities to contemporary Facetuning.

Walking into the St. Ann’s Warehouse, where The Maids has transferred from London, that extravagance is immediately clear, even behind frilly curtains. Rosanna Vize’s thrust bedroom set is dressed up like Petra von Kant’s babydoll-camgirl fantasy, and Dan Balfour’s crisp sound design thumps home a hyperpop slinkiness. But in updating the 1947 play for the present moment, Williams confuses the titular servants’ kinky imagination for more pedestrian fantasies of notoriety, sapping the production of depth though not pleasure. 

Genet’s one-room drama is deviously enigmatic, not least because it begins with a fakeout which, once resolved, continues to peek open psychological side doors. Sisters Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) play master and slave while their wealthy Madame (Yerin Ha) is away; mocking her through elaborate games equally based on their desire to kill her and reflective of a knottier attraction to imbalanced power dynamics.

As in Dorian Gray, Williams’ introduction of cellphones as means of corrupted personal storytelling remains punchy, slick and current. But whereas that story of self-deception is primed for solipsism, The Maids is built on a more nuanced matrix of overlapping consent. Blown up onto the boudoir’s back walls (by Zakk Hein’s video design), the sisters constant use of Snapchat filters and Instagram livestreams is fun to look at, but misinterprets their hunger for either side of oppression. Their boss’s lavish lifestyle might have a healthy online following, but social media fame is not the same as power, and certainly not what gives this influencer her influence.

Genet was not out to write an anti-capitalist play but rather, like Fassbinder (who later adapted the writer’s Querelle for film and was most likely inspired by this play when writing The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, about another sapphic subjection) interested in the compulsions behind control. Foregrounding what is seen by the outside world, via social media, levels all three women onto the same playing field, the same ultimate goal, and reduces Genet’s tricky exploration of submission and domination into a fight for who can attain the most followers.

If Williams’ Maids doesn’t offer the same revelations as his Dorian, it again benefits from extraordinary performances and the dizzying overstimulation that can come only from an assured hand. The style elements here (including Marg Horwell’s erotica-chic costumes, Jon Clark’s gauzy lighting, DJ Walde’s original compositions) are delightfully engaging, and whatever interventions the writer-director creates never overshadow or make illegible the author’s original intent; a rare gift in adaptation. Very little theatre has caused in me the same invigorating giddiness as Williams’ recent New York outings have, and to that I’ll always be in thrall.

The Maids is in performance through June 14, 2026 at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Water Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.