Theater review | A "Marat/Sade" with nothing new to say about the lunacy of society

Theater Review |

Twitching, trembling. Stuttering, staggering. Yelling, yowling. Jabbering and gesticulating.

Young actors tend to love the chance to get in-your-face with extreme behavior, as in Balagan Theatre's "Marat/Sade."Huddled within the confines of a chain-link fence in Balagan's basement Capitol Hill space, the players are on exhibit like zoo animals. And as unmedicated residents of a bygone French insane asylum, their behavior is vividly bestial.

It's been some 40 years since Peter Brook's bold attack on this Brechtian play by German author Peter Weiss caused cultural shock waves on both sides of the Atlantic.

But these days, the society-asylum analogy and excesses of "acting crazy," by an energized ensemble ensemble directed by Richard Clairmont, seem mighty hackneyed.

Brook's Royal Shakespeare Company version of "Marat/Sade" — full title: "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 (or Marat/Sade)" — debuted in the mid-1960s, a heady period for "total theater" experimentation.

When the show came to Broadway in 1965, it triggered a lively debate between ardent defenders and detractors, and collected four Tony Awards.

The central conceit of the work: Mental patients at the French asylum of Charenton perform a play by the scandalous Marquis de Sade (who was confined to the hospital in 1808, when the play occurs), which re-enacts the historic 1793 murder of French Revolution leader Marat by young Charlotte Corday.

The asylum's director boasts that the show-within-a-show is part of a new approach to mental health care — an early form of drama therapy.

But as it unfolds, in bitterly ironic song and verse, the patients also act out their own rage and oppression. And de Sade espouses nihilistic, sensuous, individualist revolution, in opposition to the violent, collective sort.

The play's heavily didactic passages are crisply articulated by Lyam White (a blessedly mannerism-free Marquis de Sade), while as Charenton director Coulmier, Jonathan Wright tiresomely frets and fumes.

Rising from the morass of feigned madness, Banton Foster and Samuel Hagen recite their roles cogently, while Heather Roberts is a wan, wispy Corday stand-in.

Richard Peaslee's catchy tunes for Brook's "Marat/Sade" (including the instantly hummable anthem,"Give us our rights / And we don't care how / We want a revolution ... now!") are used here. But along with English co-adaptors Adrian Mitchell and Geoffrey Skelton, Peaslee, is uncredited on the program.

Some lines in "Marat/Sade" do retain a bruising social relevance and dialectical sting — like the observation that the poor "always seem to lose the lottery" of life, and Coulmier's bogus boast, "We are citizens of an enlightened age!" But the stagy eruptions of infernal din make the Balagan rendering seem more like an overly earnest, faux-freak show.

Are there other ways to do "Marat/Sade"? Apparently so. Recently, the Classical Theatre of Harlem revived it with a multiracial cast and a trimmed text. That production also had its fans and pans, but perhaps it rattled the cages of consciousness more convincingly.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com