October 22–29, 1998

reviews|theater

No Asylum

Marat/Sade

Hedgerow Theater, 64 Rose Valley Road, Rose Valley, through Nov. 21, (610) 565-4211

The full title may explain the plot: "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade." After the French Revolution, the famous sadist was imprisoned in a madhouse where, German playwright Peter Weiss imagines, he wrote a play and used the other inmates as his actors. The subject of this imagined play is the historical murder of Marat, a famous leader of the Revolution, by a country girl named Charlotte Corday who killed him with a knife. The 19th-century French artist Louis David immortalized this event in his painting, The Death of Marat, showing him in his bathtub, his arm, still holding his pen, hanging over the side, the head at a Christ-like tilt.

Fashionable society used to come and watch the madmen as an evening's entertainment; Weiss casts us as that audience, politicizing the very act of attending the play. That Weiss was a German Jew writing about the "final solution" in a play about the French Revolution suggests how deeply political this play is meant to be.

The legendary 1965 production of Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook for the Royal Shakespeare Company, generated stories befitting a legend: serious injuries every night, a cast that had to be quelled with fire hoses on the last day of filming the production, public panel discussions among some of the foremost actors and intellectuals of the English-speaking world which finally had to be forcibly concluded at 3 a.m. These were all signs of a radical, thrilling experiment in avant-garde theater—dangerous in every way, requiring actors to risk not only their limbs but their psyches and the limits of their craft. It also required audiences willing to risk watching two world-class talkers, the Marquis and Marat, argue about the meaning of human existence. It should be fierce, provocative theater: assaulting and substantial and funny and sexy and weird.

Relax. There's nothing to worry about at Hedgerow Theatre's production. This is as suburban and as tame as a soup commercial. The singing is weak, the lighting is willy-nilly, the acting either booming or feeble. The only role plausibly performed is Ian Merrill Peakes' Marat. As Sade, Curt Karibalis is tarted up like the MC in Cabaret and this supposed embodiment of elegant disaffection carries on like a Shakespearean parody. The pompous, Napoleonic head of the asylum is played by Bernie Miller, who seems inappropriately sweet, kindly and distinctly Jewish. The brutal hospital orderlies are merely props and the intimidating nuns merely devout.

Worse yet, the sex is sanitized and the madness is cute. Nobody twitches, nobody drools; during the famous song about "Copulation" everybody skips. None of the actors conveys that they are not playing historical characters, but lunatics playing historical characters—a significantly missing layer. The supposedly necessary division between the audience and the crazies is violated constantly as the actors run past the stage edge and into the house. Every way the script underscores its meaning with stage directions has been ignored, defeating the production over and over again. The only really shocking thing about this Marat/Sade is that director Penelope Reed undertook to rewrite the conclusion, opting for sentimentality as an easy big finish. And they don't even get the famous David tableau right, which the playwright sets up as a gift to any director.

Well, that revolution sure is over.

-Toby Zinman