Marat / Sade
Marat / Sade
By Peter Weiss
Adaptation by Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell
Music by Richard Peaslee
Directed by Michael Shugg
Starring John DiDonna, Eric Fagan, and Christian Guevarra
Valencia Character Company, Orlando FL</strong>
Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you can’t produce theater. The Marquise de Sade (DiDonna) finds himself in the progressive insane asylum of 1808 Charenton. Coulmier, the asylum manager (Fagan) allows him to produce a piece of theater about the murder of Marat (Guevarra) hoping the play might help inmates as much as hydrotherapy. The topic is politically touchy, the French revolution is fresh in the public eye and Napoleon just got whupped on by the Spanish. Marat and the rest had toppled the aristocracy, but had yet to figure out how to build a stable and sane society in 1793, and 15 years later the problem still had more than few raw edges.
On a grimy set covered with bunting and bars, a ragtag array of men and women shuffle in with two “Nurses”(Naveed Chinoy and Flavio Malachi) keeping them out of the audience. Their ills cover more ground than even today’s miracle happy pills can cure, but at least they’ve recently bathed. Coulmier is fussy and officious, a role made more humorous by his slight build and fancy hair. Marat, notionally a paranoid, sits in his bathtub suffering from skin diseases and the burning thought that enough scribbling will not only change the world, but make it better. The murderous Charlotte Corday (Samantha O’Hare) suffers narcolepsy but wields a mean kitchen knife. She dozes thought the story with a pair of nuns (Neil Bernard, Shannon Singley) and Sade keeping her on her marks. The mentally ill are so often accommodating, but lack a sense of dramatic timing. Wrapped in straight jacket is the radial priest Jacques Roux (Robert Wright III), yelling invective to encourage Marat and upset Coulmier. DiDonna seems a bit clean-cut for a libertine and child molester, but he coaches the actors, makes outrageous speeches, and early removes his short when Corday whips his bare back. I admire his authenticity on stage, but there are some things that ought to remain private. However, flagellation wasn’t the most extreme activity, we had a nicely authentic water boarding and even a hanging. It’s Grand Guignol, Lite.
This loud, raucous production pushes VCC’s staging skills but succeeds in creating the incoherence of a mad house temporarily channeled into a purposeful activity. The set is a pile of large boxes and grilles that entrap and confine the bodies of the deranged, even as they are reasonably free to mingle with the bourgeois in the seats. You might have an autistic help you to your seat or a simpleton sit in your lap, but they all mean well. The danger lies not in the insane but in the principled men who make revolution. As De Sade points out, many join the revolt because the soup is burnt or their shoes are too tight, but after a few million die, their feet still hurt and the soup tastes the same. Revolution is a dangerous thing, it might actually work and then you find the Ancien Régime did offer a few services of value, like civic order and steady food. Just remember, when you start the revolt, people will expect you to keep the trains on time. That counts for more than your political purity.
For more information on Valencia Character Company, please visit http://valenciacc.edu/theater/
