Word: sade
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...color; another with a close-up of Marat's head dangling from a severed neck; and yet another with late 18th-century design, reading, "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." The French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat seen through the eyes of the Prince of Perversion himself, the Marquis de Sade. Surely not a boring evening...
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...
Marat starts with the support of his countrymen, but his motives for joining and ultimately leading the Revolution are slowly twisted at de Sade's beckoning. His supporters accuse him of joining the Revolution only after having failed to gain fame in the ancien regime, he is shown to be a loser and a power-hungry wretch. In the end, Marat himself is convinced by these torturers of his own base motives. He asks himself, "Each argument was true...and now...why does everything sound so false?" as they cheer him on sarcastically: "Marat for Dictator!" And all the while...
...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...
...island of sanity in this turbulent pool. With biting zest, he shows perhaps the only real awareness of his surroundings, and thus provides contrast to the rest of his cast--he sets them up expertly, so that their full abberation can be appreciated. David Levine as the Marquis de Sade speaks in such a laggardly, elephantine voice that some of his more intelligent soliloquies of de Sade's perversions sound unconvincing. He lacks the intensity and the wicked gleam in his eye necessary to persuade us he believes in the ideology of pain he espouses. There is a moment...