A Production of ‘The Maids’ for the Internet Era

Jean Genet’s The Maids has proven irresistible material to theater-makers over the last 80-odd years. With its unflinching exploration of the politics of sex, power, and identity, iterations past have compelled the likes of Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert, and Elizabeth Debicki to take on roles in the three-woman production, which homes in on the relational dynamics between Claire and Solange—two sisters and downtrodden housemaids—and their mistress, known simply as Madame, whom they fantasize about murdering.

“I remember someone saying, ‘Every director wants to do their Maids’—for some, it’s their Hamlet,” says Lydia Wilson. Together with Phia Saban and Yerin Ha, she will soon open writer-director Kip Williams’s highly stylized adaptation of the play at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, following its limited run at the Donmar Warehouse in London late last year.

Williams’s modernized script sees Madame (played by Ha) recast as an heiress-turned-influencer—a caricature of undeserved privilege. Claire (Wilson) and Solange (Saban), meanwhile, are at once engaged as housekeepers, personal assistants, and, as in Genet’s original, Madame’s only meaningful connections to the world. But even as the maids and their madame inflict all manner of horrific behavior upon one another, Williams may have saved the most fraught role for the viewer. As the sheers encircling Madame’s sleek bedroom suite draw open, the director makes his audience the silent voyeurs whose attention spurs the plot toward its tragic finale.

This Maids is the latest in a succession of West End productions to transfer to New York without losing its headlining cast members along the way. Ha—who previously worked with Williams in 2019, on a production of Lord of the Flies in Sydney—was excited to return to the play. “Coming back into the rehearsal room, I felt like I was ready, but also hoping to expand and dive deeper into what we had already explored. That’s a real gift, because it doesn’t come often.”

A lot had happened since her first go at the play. On January 29, eight weeks to the day after The Maids closed at Donmar Warehouse, Netflix dropped part one of Bridgerton’s fourth season, which starred Ha as Sophie Baek, opposite Luke Hall’s Benedict Bridgerton. By then, Ha had already been anointed the series’ new leading lady, and by the end of premiere day, her first major interviews with the American press had gone live. A few weeks later, she was named the 2026 Ambassador of the Actor Awards, formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Bridgerton wasn’t Ha’s first role in a series, but it was her first brush with international stardom. “I feel like the way I understand Madame now comes through a new lens,” she tells Vogue. That serves the work well: “It is a very modern take,” Ha explains, examining “materialism, and this obsession with youth and beauty, and the role that it plays in our society.” Williams’s staging is rife with knowing references to follower counts, seemingly every designer label in operation today, the promise of securing a major magazine cover—all familiar proxies of wealth and status. (“It was a bit of a revelation,” Wilson says of encountering Williams’s adaptation of Genet’s script. “I read it in a coffee shop the day he sent it. I was just laughing out loud like, Oh, my God, the audacity to turn it this modern and to give it such a spin.”)

“Diving deeper into those themes and how that resonates with me today, versus how it resonated with me a year ago—that has shifted as well,” Ha says.

The text embraces those themes with a lurid, absurdist sense of humor that spares no one. “That’s the wild thing about acting,” says Saban, who will be known to some as Halaena Targaryen on HBO’s House of the Dragon. “If you’re lucky enough to do something that has enough attention to qualify for press, there’s this strange dissonance between presenting the appealing side of yourself, but then hopefully, in your work, getting to explore being horrific.”

“[Kip] colors every single word. Everything has a meaning and intention behind it,” adds Ha. “It’s been quite an evolution of me as a person, as an artist, and with him as well. Now 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, 2026.