Karamu has a proud heritage as America's oldest black theater. It's launched a myriad of careers and had illustrious associations with such great names as Langston Hughes, Ruby Dee and Zora Neale Hurston. Less illustriously, a few seasons ago, the theater went somewhat off-message by programming the most stale of white-bread comedies, Neil Simon's The Odd Couple (even worse, the female version). For this, it owed the muse of theater a debt.

Now, by attempting its second staging (the last was in 1969) of Jean Genet's massive, excruciatingly difficult 1958 drama The Blacks, it has repaid that debt. Genet was the ultimate outsider of postwar French culture. He was a homosexual poet, thief and novelist who wrote his first book in prison on a roll of toilet paper. The industrious Frenchman was too busy cruising the docks to learn the niceties of playwriting. His theatrical works - to quote critic Kenneth Tynan - "are acts of vengeance directed against the bourgeois audience he detested."

Les Negres grew out of a commission to create a text for black actors. The playwright claims that it was inspired by a music box that had on its lid four black valets bowing to a white princess. The resulting work, along with Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, has elicited years of racial discomfort as creations of white men who dared to attempt to explore the essence of blackness. In his play, Genet dredged up an eternal recurring wound that is anathema to all the Oprahs of the world because he refused to cauterize it.

The work approaches Greek tragedy in its ritual-like presentation. A group of black actors wearing grotesque parodies of boulevard evening clothes and royal vestments converge to reenact the ritual murder of a white woman in the form of a theatrical pageant. As it turns out, this is a ruse to cover up the offstage execution of a disobedient black man. The play does not employ conventional dramatic dialogue. Instead, the characters speak in verse, doggerel and attempts at Homeric chant.

It's a piece that requires choreographic precision and ideally should suggest an ominous variation on Cirque du Soleil - a work of mood and shadows that emphasizes ensemble over individual performance. At the Karamu preview I attended, I was the only Caucasian in the audience. As per Genet's instructions, I was thus singled out, with floozies stroking me, thugs threatening me and diatribes delivered directly into my face. I was supposed to be made to feel the sacrificial goat about to be ritually slaughtered. But actually, I felt like a bar mitzvah boy at a performance of Guys and Dolls.

Director Terrence Spivey and a perhaps too likable cast, in trying to recreate Genet's world of eternal power plays, generate musical comedy sass rather than ritual danger. Of three hours, approximately only one realizes the work's opiate dream world.

The original legendary off-Broadway production ran 1,408 performances and helped start a theater revolution. At present, this sleeping beauty of a giant still awaits the kiss of genius for its resurrection.

The Blacks: Through May 11 at Karamu Theatre, 2355 E. 89th St., 216.795.7070.