Marat/Sade Plays Like a Crazy '60s Flashback
First, a word of warning. Last night we went to see Marat/Sade and this morning cut ourselves so deeply shaving that that darker red blood poured out--not the usual pink nick. And we blame that--with subcutaneous justice--on watching a play where you spend 90-plus minutes waiting for someone to get stabbed. Clearly some sort of blood lust was excited. So if you go to Balagan Theatre's production (running through January 31, tickets $15), and out of sheer perversity you might well want to, watch it around sharp objects afterwards.
Back in 1964, when Weiss's Marat/Sade was having its English premiere (the original is German), people would storm out in anger or shake in their seats. But that day is gone--just as the Rite of Spring hasn't provoked many riots lately. What remains is a highly anti-theatrical essay on individual identity (de Sade), revolutionary purity (Marat), and timid liberalism (Coulmier). It's gassy with college-dorm intellectual appropriation, and full of stabs at "modern day" relevance--and yet as a kind of negative-image Godspell, it entertains and disturbs because of its dated hipness. The conceit that the shrieking Charenton lunatics are stand-ins for then-hippies almost collapses in on itself to become a pure referential loop.
Marat (Jason Harber) surrounded by other inmates of Charenton in Marat/Sade.
As you walk into Balagan, you see signs warning you not to interact with the inmates, who are in the hallway and scratching and gibbering in corners of the house. The set is contained by a chain link fence. Marat (Jason Harber, high-minded and neurotically malevolent) is in his tub, soaking his debilitating skin condition. A hunchback herald (Ryan Higgins, who uses his verse lines to great effect) gives you the set-up, and guides you though the play.
The Marquis de Sade (Lyam White) with a Charenton inmate (Megan Jackson) in Marat/Sade.
We should mention, also, that it's a musical. It's not easy to hear the songs--director Richard Clairmont keeps the cast in alarming, spasmodic motion--but given that the idea is inmates in an asylum, we made allowances for audio quality. As it happens, the songs are about "things of import" but don't really further the play's story, so half-heard is perfectly fine. You may find the "Copulation Round" sexy--or hilariously awkward--but it does point up one weakness in Clairmont's direction. We sat through the whole show without being repulsed or outraged (Where's Waxie Moon when we need him?), and we feel like de Sade would have been upset at that.
One of the strengths of Balagan, its actors and its intimate seating arrangements, is that shows there can be uncomfortably right there in front of you. This production had flashes of anarchic life, but little in the way of the actual electricity of shock.
