Word: sadeness
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These are some of the inmates of the asylum at Charenton, a progressive booby-bin that housed sex criminals and lunatics in post-Revolutionary France, and sheltered the Marquis de Sade for the last distracted years of his life. Sade was no more popular with the Comstocks of the Napoleonic era than he had been with the Bourbons' cheka; both regimes jailed him for the same apolitical crimes. But Charenton's enlightened director M. Coulmier encouraged him to write and direct plays for the inmates, and Charenton became a sort of high camp Vauxhall for the Parisian upper crust...
...Theater Company of Boston's interpretation of The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (abbreviated Marat/Sade) owes much to the scheme of those who created it (abbreviate Weiss/Brook). Sired by Brecht, Artaud, Genet and Pirandello, conceived by the German filmmaker and novelist Peter Weiss, translated by Geoffrey Skelton, set to music by R. C. Peaslee, and delivered in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Peter Brook, the play is not one man's play open to interpretation by other...
...gist, Marat/Sade shows Sade's little company reenacting the death of the Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat at the hand of the Royalist Charlotte Corday, before a stage audience of Charenton's director and his lady. But the murder is strung out by the philosophical intrusions of Sade, who leaves his stage-side perch to argue with Marat and deflect the action; by the blank verse narration of the herald, who prompts, cajoles and apologizes; by the petulant interruptions of M. Courmier, upset by the political content of the skit; and by the eruptions of the mental patients...
...either the leads or the audience to breathe or reflect. David Wheeler's Boston version inherits most of Weiss/Brook's inspiration and contributes a little of its own. The play "breathes." Marat (Clinton Kimbrough) hunkers in a large bathtub at the center, periodically approached by Corday (Lisa Richards) and Sade (Frederick Kimball). The patients sprawl, wander and sprint across the stage in johnnies and slippers. And a chorus in the tatters of Revolutionary costumes roams from the lights to the wings, now clustering around the tub to mime the principals' conversation, now reaching out to incite the patients to riot...
...excitement is relentless. Jacques Roux (Robert Fields), the mad priest of the insurrection, bursts in straitjacketed and has to be crushed. Deperret (Joseph Hindy), an "erotomaniac" whom Brook equipped with a perpetual erection, urges Charlotte to return to Caen; he forgets himself and nearly rapes her. Sade is whipped -- in London and New York with Corday's flowing hair, since the decency laws forbade public flagellation -- and here with a lash of six flat leather tails. Marat sinks into darkness and confronts the ghosts of his past, who slander his childhood, and Voltaire and Lavoisier, who mock his scientific achievements...