Jonathon Church as the Marquis de Sade in Forum Theatre's Marat/Sade. Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Asylum director Coulmier personally welcomes you as you step into the septic green confines of the bathhouse at Charenton, silently congratulating yourself on the liberal Enlightenment values that have brought you here to watch Coulmier’s lunatics perform a history-play penned by his most notorious patient, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. It’s therapy, for them and for him, this playacting. You’re most kind to join their audience. In the bad old days of the Monarchy, this sort of thing would have been unthinkable. Society’s unwanted were simply locked away and forgotten. Now we know better. After all, it’s 1808!

Such is the famous Chinese-boxes construction of Peter Weiss's 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, mercifully abbreviated as Marat/Sade.

Coulmier really did allow de Sade to write and stage his plays during the infamous libertine’s second stay at Charenton, this time at the invitation of Napoleon Bonaparte, who Gitmo'd his ass for writing the the obscene novels Justine and Juliet.

These productions were open to the public, and by all accounts, the dedicated followers of fashion flocked. We watch the performance with Coulmier and his wife and daughter. That he brings along his wife and daughter is either a comment on Coulmier's vanity or his heartfelt belief in the soundness of the progressive therapies he prescribed. (Steve Beall buries his usual manly brio to make Coulmier an ineffectual, if sincere, Enlightenment gentleman.)

Given their deliciously varied psychological infirmities, the inmate-actors sometimes have trouble staying in character and sometimes embrace their roles with violent ardor. Baton-wielding orderlies stand at alert and occasionally intervene. Coulmier becomes increasingly alarmed as it becomes clear the Marquis has not made the script revisions — deletions —Coulmier demanded as a condition of allowing the show to go forward. The lunatics have taken over the — well, you get the idea.

Charlotte Corday (Katy Carkuff) makes ready to dispatch Monsieur Marat (Danny Gavigan). Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Peter Weiss’s 1963 script is a thing of barely controlled chaos, more a pageant than a play, really, which didn't prevent it from taking home four Tony Awards when Peter Brooks staged it in New York in 1966. Michael Dove’s adept staging here is easily Forum Theatre’s most ambitious effort to date. Jesse Terrill, in addition to assaying the role of the Herald, composed original music for the show’s songs (the lyrics are in the script). His broken melodies do a lot to build the air of menace that pervades, though Weiss gives the songs a few demented reprises too many. Set and lighting designers Matt Soule and Andrew Griffin have made as convincing a facsimile of an sanitarium bathhouse as you'd be willing to set foot in -- easier in the black box that is the H Street Playhouse than it would be at, say, the Landsburgh, but still impressive.

But the songs and the set would all be for naught without the rich, multilayered performances turned in by every principal member of the large cast, starting with the Marquis himself. Jonathan Church is mesmerizing in the role, perfectly capturing the Marquis's manic delight in hearing his words spoken aloud (even by people who, intellectually, were as insects to him) and his struggle to confine his jeremiad -- as applicable to the new, postrevolutionary order as it was to the old -- within the permissive boundaries set by Coulmier. ("We only show those things that happened long ago," the Herald stammers feebly, after one of de Sade's rants reachers a particularly heated crescendo.)

The Marquis was 68 years old in July 1808, when Marat/Sade is set. Church plays him as maybe half that age, though this works as an artistic choice. Sade's family had already intervened to spare him the guillotine on a number of occasions, and it makes sense that he would be seized by youthful fury given any outlet for the polemical torrents of his mind. (For the pornographic torrents of his mind, you have to rent Quills.)

As Charlotte Corday, the woman who assassinated the powerful Jacobin revolutionary Marat in his bathtub in 1793, Katy Carkuff is frequently in a state of delirium, but she makes the torment real. Carkuff and Danny Gavigan, as the feverish, tubridden Marat, are both especially good at giving the awkward line-readings of the inmates-as-actors, but subtly moving to inhabit the characters their characters are playing as the story progresses. Parker Dixon is credibly unhinged as the inmate playing Corday's boyfriend, Duperret. That the Marquis would cast Dixon's crazed rapist in the role of Corday's lover seems appropriately perverse.

There's so much happening here that the business of the asylum and the action of the play-within-the-play often feel like they're competing with another, leaving the audience uncertain of where Weiss, or Dove, want to direct their eyes and their thoughts. But that's the genius of the thing. Weiss built a sprawling, unwieldy platform for sprawling, unwieldy questions of democracy and madness and the soul of a state permanently at war. Dove and his cast have brought Weiss's feverish vision to vivid, rank-breathed life.

Escapist it isn't. But exhilarating it is.

Marat/Sade (approximately two hours and 20 minutes, including one intermission) is at the H Street Playhouse through Sunday, Aug. 10. Tickets are available here.