Word: sade
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...sense, Maral/Sade is a Manichean morality play. There are forces of good and evil, but they move impartially through all of the characters. As Sade says in an epilogue, he wished to test great propositions and their opposites but they all seem colored and half-true by the end of the play, and thus if nothing else, the play makes a brilliant statement of the mixed nature of men's souls. Good and evil. Playwright Peter Wiess wisely refuses to sort out clear alternatives, or declare a final winner. The script gives only vague clues as to whether Weiss feels...
...current Adams 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...
...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...
...Marat/Sade moves through different contexts of reality. It is a play about a play in which psychotics (Marat is played by a paranoiac who is in turn played by John Mckean) act out Sade's own recreation of the Revolution. Occasionally one can get lost somewhere in between the levels. To this, Bernstein has added a particular jolt by having William Liller, Master of Adams House, play Coulmier, Master of the Charenton asylum. Liller is a natural...
...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...