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.
