Word: coulmier
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...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...
...played by a paranoiac who is in turn played by John Mckean) act out Sade's own recreation of the Revolution. Occasionally one can get lost somewhere in between the levels. To this, Bernstein has added a particular jolt by having William Liller, Master of Adams House, play Coulmier, Master of the Charenton asylum. Liller is a natural...
...sheltered the Marquis de Sade for the last distracted years of his life. Sade was no more popular with the Comstocks of the Napoleonic era than he had been with the Bourbons' cheka; both regimes jailed him for the same apolitical crimes. But Charenton's enlightened director M. Coulmier encouraged him to write and direct plays for the inmates, and Charenton became a sort of high camp Vauxhall for the Parisian upper crust, who appeared regularly to see the former Marquis' bombastic plays and hysterical associates...
...Marat/Sade is so intrinsically exciting, and TCB's acting so good, that the play is exhaustingly effective. John Coe (Herald), Frank Cassidy (Coulmier) and Bronia Stefan (Marat's mistress Simonne) deserve mention. Roberta Collinge and Josephine Lane highlight the chorus, and the full-throated Katherine Garnett (who drools) very nearly takes the show. Go, if you think you can Brook it. But hope David Wheeler tightens up Act I by tonight, when I'm going again...
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