Word: marat
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...House production definitely takes up Maral's revolutionary standard, but this is almost by default. Sade is very poorly played, and lacks any emotional definition. Andrew Apter gambols through all of Sade's lines, including descriptions of unimaginable tortures, with the same cherubic smile. John McKean is better as Marat, but he too fails to give much emotional content to his character's "persecution and assassination." McKean is in "real life" a member of the Worker-Student Alliance, and may have purposely shied from developing the ambiguities and existential isolation that Weiss wrote into the character. As with Apter...
...meat of the play as it is scripted-the interplay of Sade's world view and Marat's-comes off poorly. The abstract discussions of what the revolution was about, where and why it failed. and what the failures mean about mankind. remain abstract. unembodied in subtler means of expression. What makes this production so fine are the performances of the lesser characters-the inmates... "the people" in metaphor. These roles are largely non-verbal, and Director Charles Bernstein has achieved with his very raw staging (no lights, props, or costumes, and no raised stage) a Grotowski energy level without...
...method. Audience confrontation is important, not in-itself or for-itself, but within the context of the theatrical illusion, which, in this most metaphorical work, Bernstein and his cast have wisely chosen to grant. At the close of the first act, the inmates march toward the audience singing "Marat we're poor and the poor stay poor. Marat don't make us wait anymore. We want our rights, and we don't care how. We want a revolution now." And the music stops and the cast is inches from the first row, staring at people in the audience; Bernstein...
...four, the dark, hulking Reed is the most remote from the author's conception of a Nordic superman. The closest to the true Lawrentian is Glenda Jackson, who made her reputation as Charlotte Corday in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Marat-Sade. Playing the repressed, inflammable Gudrun, she is a total re-creation of the impassioned, nearly liberated woman whose yards of shapeless clothes could not conceal her unrelieved sexual longing, and whose prudish conversation was almost always alive with allusions...
...Artaud wanted to gore it into a blood-dripping emotional awareness of the anguish of the age; Among those who have most notably tried to follow Artaud's precepts in the modern theater are Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater, British Director Peter Brook (Marat/ Sade) and Director Jerzy Gro-towski with his Polish Laboratory Theater. The Living Theater is sloppy, Brook is marvelously disciplined but a trifle too cerebral, and Grotowski combines fantastic discipline with lacerating emotional intensity...