Word: marat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...production of Marat/Sade uses the same technique. From the moment the house opens, the actors are on stage, ad-libbing their roles as mental patients. Marat/Sade is perhaps the ultimate play-within-a-play, with the inmates of an insane asylum outside Paris portraying the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a left-wing journalist-leader of the French Revolution, under the direction of fellow-inmate Marquis de Sade. The audience finds itself assuming two roles: on the one hand, we are the French intellectuals of 1808 who are watching the inmates, and on the other, we are ourselves, watching...
Weiss's play is not an easy one to understand; as the story unfolds, the layers go deeper and deeper, with nuance upon nuance adding to its complexity. On one level, it is about the contrast between Marat, the revolutionary trapped in a bathtub by skin disease, and Sade, who denounces the French downtrodden's uprising in favor of a more passionate kind of violence. On another, the play is about the thin line between sanity and lunacy: the inmates' presentation of the world seems less and less crazy as their play progresses. On yet another level, it is about...
There is no easy moral here, Sade tells the audience at the end of the play. He is left "with a question that's always open," unable to decide between Marat's attempts to enforce justice with the guillotine, and his own efforts to change the world through exploring the individual psyche. Answers to the questions in the other levels of the play are no more forthcoming, and in the end, the audience sees not answers but chaos. The lunatics take over, and the asylum's guards can only create order with their clubs...
...Marquis de Sade was convinced that the French Revolution was a mistake. Or at least that seems to be the explanation behind that notorious writer's decision to stage a mock murder of one of the revolution's leaders in 'The persecution and assasination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of the Marquis de Sade' which (if you can make it past the title) you should go to see this weekend at the Loeb Mainstage. According to director Kerry Konrad '78, this play within a play, in which neither the passion of the revolution, of the marquis...
...Marquis de Sade was convinced that the French Revolution was a mistake. Or at least that seems to be the explanation behind that notorious writer's decision to stage a mock murder of one of the revolution's leaders in "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." According to director Kerry Konrad '78, this play within a play, in which neither the passion of the revolution, of the marquis or of the inmates seems to know any bounds, is particularly suited...