Word: sade
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 the re-enactment of Marat's death, the inmates performing the play, and the French intellectuals' response to the whole...
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...
...Myers carefully outlines the transition from the asylum's paranoid to its demagogue, calling from his tub to the mobs of Paris. His is not an easy role: it is difficult to play a strong character whose body is so weak, and few Marats really compete with their counterpart Sade. As Sade, George Miller is the clear star of the Loeb show, presenting his cynical vision of humanity with great stage presence...
...UNIQUE FEATURES of Marat/Sade is the constant presence of lunatics, not directly involved in the reenactment of Marat's death. They remain on stage, becoming the illustration of all that Marat and Sade discuss--they are the Parisian poor, rightfully indignant against injustice in Marat's eyes, depraved in Sade's. The asylum guards are there, too, to underline the absurdity of the statement by the asylum director (Stephen Toope) that everything has changed, that Napoleon has brought demands for liberty, equality and brotherhood to fruition...