Daring ‘Maids’ From New Kids on the Block

Jean Genet’s “The Maids” has always been an unsettling play, but the daring version by Fabulous Monsters, the new company at Glaxa Studios in Silverlake, puts a particularly ominous spin on the work.

The title characters--chambermaids locked in a love-hate relationship with their rich employer--are here played by men (director Robert A. Prior and Kevin Hincker). Sporting shaved heads and heavily powdered faces, the pair resemble the vampire from the German horror film “Nosferatu.”

Madame, whom the treacherous maids want to emulate and to poison, is also played by a man in drag, Mark Brey, who with his deliciously regal bearing and strapping physique takes the disturbing androgyny one step further.

Prior’s sure visual sense highlights the themes of power struggle and class consciousness that course through Genet’s text. The use of props becomes highly animated with the addition of four mute “men in black.”

When the maids cry, “The objects are against us!,” Prior has the pair silently encircled by the men, who are carrying a phone and other symbols of the materialism that these characters find both oppressive and seductive.

Genet’s play, which sparks more of an intellectual than an emotional response, can be similarly oppressive and seductive. But probably few interpretations are as engaging as the one by this talented ensemble.

* “The Maids,” Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Silverlake. Fridays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 18. $12. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.