A Piece of Home on a New York Stage: The Maids Comes to NYC

This June, something extraordinary happened at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City — and I had the honor of documenting it.

The Maids, Jean Genet's landmark play, arrived in the city as an international production by Georgia's Royal District Theatre, presented by Emolas Corporation. For anyone who knows this text, you know its weight: a tense, hypnotic study of power, servitude, and identity, staged and restaged by theaters around the world for decades. To see it brought to New York by a Georgian company, performed with such intensity and craft, was something I won't forget.

As a proud Georgian, being part of this journey — even just behind the lens — was an emotional experience from start to finish. Documenting these performances felt like more than a job. It felt like carrying a piece of home across the ocean and setting it down, for one night, in the heart of Manhattan.

Gratitude, in Full

None of this happens without the people who pour themselves into it, and there are so many I need to thank.

To Director Niko Tavadze — for a vision sharp and uncompromising enough to do justice to Genet's original text, and for trusting me to help tell this story visually.

To the extraordinary actresses who carried this production — Nata Murvanidze, Nino Kasradze, and Baia Dvalishvili — thank you. Watching you work up close, night after night, was a privilege. The way you moved through Genet's language, the control, the rawness — it's the kind of performance that stays with an audience long after the lights come up.

To the entire crew — the people who never take a bow but without whom none of this exists — thank you for your work, your patience, and your dedication.

And a very special thank you to Emolas Corporation and Salome Liluashvili, for making this all happen. Bringing an international production of this scale to New York takes vision and no small amount of determination — thank you for believing in this project and for giving Georgian theater a stage in this city.

A Little Bit of Saqartvelo in NYC

There's something particular about seeing your home country's art land somewhere so far from home. For a few nights at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, New York held a little piece of Saqartvelo — our language of gesture and performance, right there in the middle of Manhattan. For those of us far from home, it was nostalgia and pride, tangled together, in the best possible way.

Thank you to everyone who came out to witness it, and to everyone who made it possible. This is exactly the kind of story I love getting to document — and I can't wait to see where this cast and company go next.