Word: leafed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most recent Harvard production, directed by James M. Leaf ’10, never quite manages to yoke the bloody, staggering energy of the text, it mostly doesn’t matter; the resulting performance still fulfills the creepy, shaking nature of Weiss’ script. “Marat/Sade” is an apt and skilled production of a difficult and exciting play. It is unfortunate, though, that it sometimes overwhelms itself with the promise of its own potential...
...watch both the play itself and the intellectuals’ reaction to it. This idea of surveillance and reaction comes from the text—Weiss was influenced by the theories of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright who believed in politicizing theater by highlighting its artificiality—and Leaf uses it fully...
...times, these moments are more silly than shocking, but when they work, Leaf causes the distress the play wants. Toward the middle of the play, Corday whips Sade under his own request. No real leather is used (Jakim sets her hair to the task), but Jampol’s grimaces and cries express such a mix of pain and pleasure that it is hard to believe that no one is getting hurt. Standing, arms and legs outstretched in the middle of the prison, she is at once physically bound and liberated in her speech...
Unfortunately, some more subtle aspects of the script never fully rise to the surface. Marat and Sade’s long debate about the nature of mankind comes across as exactly that—a debate more arcane than compelling. Leaf has said that he wished to compare the two title characters rather than contrast them, as is normally done, but in doing so, he fails to exploit the text’s inherent strength. Marat and Sade are so physically different—one spends most of the play horizontal and infirm while the other fully commands the stage?...
...These people are put in an insane asylum,” says Elyssa K. Jakim ’10, who plays Charlotte Corday. “They’re punished for what they are rather than what they’ve done.” For Leaf, this division between crimes of action and crimes of being lies at the heart of the production. “If you can truly understand the difference between them,” he says, “you can understand the play...