Word: asylums
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...with David's portrait of the dead Marat, in full color; another with a close-up of Marat's head dangling from a severed neck; and yet another with late 18th-century design, reading, "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." The French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat seen through the eyes of the Prince of Perversion himself, the Marquis de Sade. Surely not a boring evening...
...seem particularly applicable to this sort of thing. It is 1808, 15 years after the murder of Marat. A row of prison bars separates the audience from the stage, and at center lies the famous bathtub wherein Marat took his last breath. Except, in this tub lies a neurotic asylum patient, playing Marat. And all around him, the large cast of almost 20 twitching, dead-eyed, asylum inmates shuffle about, dressed in dirty white rags, talking to themselves and to their invisible friends. The four-member orchestra looks like heaven's gospel choir, dressed in white bedsheets. They should have...
Coulmier, the director of the asylum (Seth Richards) introduces the spectacle: his inmates, having been put under the direction of de Sade (David Levine), will be performing an `historical' play about Marat's murder for a public audience as proof of their `rehabilitation.' These inmates come from all walks of life: past revolutionaries, priests and vagrants. Tying the whole messy lot together is a herald (Adam Feldman), who, as the ringmaster for this crew of raving lunatics, introduces each scene as it happens in terse rhyme, prompts the players with their lines and constantly mediates between Coulmier and de Sade...
...play, of course, isn't performed quite like that. These are all asylum patients, remember, and it is with great difficulty and demented idiosyncrasy that they get through scenes, bleating out their lines like brain-dead sheep. Were it not for the anchors which the herald, de Sade, and Coulmier provide, the play would be lost on the same...
...reason. He expels his lines with lethargic volume, but does not quite seem to understand the import of his words. The three singers, played by Finn Moore Gerety, Jonathan Weinberg and Rebecca Boggs, are effective and solid, propelling the play forward with energy and style. The patients of the asylum are remarkable in creating boisterous chaos together and for sustaining their small ticks and twitches throughout the two-hour show...