A Production of ‘The Maids’ for the Internet Era

Reported by Vogue.

Jean Genet wrote The Maids in 1947, and somehow it keeps getting more relevant. The three-woman play — a pressure cooker of sex, power, and class resentment built around two sisters-turned-housekeepers fantasizing about murdering their employer — has attracted Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert, and Elizabeth Debicki over the decades. Now it's getting what might be its most pointed reinvention yet.

Director Kip Williams has updated Genet's script for an era that basically invented new ways to perform wealth and servitude simultaneously. In his staging, Madame is no longer just a pampered socialite — she's an influencer-heiress whose entire identity runs on follower counts, designer labels, and the dream of a major magazine cover. Claire and Solange remain her housekeepers, her personal assistants, and, crucially, her only real human connections — a dynamic that hits differently when you frame it through parasocial celebrity culture. Williams also implicates the audience directly, positioning them as the voyeurs whose attention drives the tragedy forward. According to Vogue, the production transferred from London's Donmar Warehouse to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn with its full cast intact: Lydia Wilson as Claire, Phia Saban as Solange, and Yerin Ha as Madame.

New Fame, Sharper Lens

Ha's casting reads differently now than it did during the London run. Eight weeks after The Maids closed at the Donmar, Netflix dropped the first part of Bridgerton's fourth season with Ha as its new lead, Sophie Baek — and overnight, she became the kind of person the play is arguably about. She was subsequently named the 2026 Ambassador of the Actor Awards. "I feel like the way I understand Madame now comes through a new lens," Ha says. The character's obsession with youth, beauty, and materialism isn't abstract to her anymore. Saban, who plays Halaena Targaryen on House of the Dragon, articulates the particular strangeness of navigating press while simultaneously embodying something monstrous onstage: "There's this strange dissonance between presenting the appealing side of yourself, but then hopefully, in your work, getting to explore being horrific."

Wilson, for her part, describes reading Williams's adaptation in a coffee shop and laughing out loud at the sheer nerve of it — the way it takes Genet's already-savage material and cranks the modern absurdity to a frequency that is, somehow, both funnier and more disturbing. Ha credits Williams with building a rehearsal room where nothing gets softened: "We've reached this place where we're able to create something really fun without censoring anything."

The Maids runs at St. Ann's Warehouse from May 17 through June 14, 2025 — and if the culture is going to keep producing women who perform deference while dreaming of destruction, the least we can do is watch it staged properly.

Read the original at Vogue.