Theater Reviews

Jan 26, 2002 - Bruka's "Marat/Sade" Doesn't Make Peter Weiss's Play Work

By Jack Neal

The controversy over whether Peter Weiss's play is great revelatory theater or just so much tripe rages on. 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" opened at Reno's Bruka Theatre Friday, January 15 (2002).

Hats off to the Bruka Theatre Company for tackling this offbeat, ragtag play, but, then, it's the kind of thing the company finds in its perceived destiny it must do. If you like your theater offbeat, unfocused and annoying you'll love Bruka's "Marat/Sade." The way it's being presented here, I found half of the play quite enough. The second half may have produced revelations the first half never suggested, but the half I witnessed was too exhausting and unsatisfying to risk more. The interval gave several inmates a chance to escape and I was one of them.

Memories of bad productions of this esoteric event play linger long after the play's complete title has lost its bite. Bruka's production lacks the focus, organization and pithy recreation of Richard Peaslee's music to make what audiences are getting the least bit fascinating. The play may have ended (or the half I saw) but the memory and bad taste will linger on for years.

I had hoped that Adrian Mitchell's fully restored verse translation of Weiss's 1964 play, as directed by Dave Anderson, would also restore faith in the existence of local provocative theater. Unfortunately, that leap of theatrical faith does not and cannot take place in the jumble of activities on display for playgoers to wade through in the name of another of Bruka's avant-garde experiences.

This play within a play deals with history, legend, political philosophy and human failings on a number of levels. Taking place in the Asylum at Charenton in France several years after the French Revolution, the play is the Marquis de Sade's contribution to art and therapy. Imprisoned in the asylum for causes mostly related to his famed depravity, Sade uses his time writing plays and having the inmates perform them. The French gliterati found the plays as amusing and titillating as the forbidden glimpse into a working madhouse. The play in this case is Sade's version of the last days of Marat, a hot-headed revolutionary killed while in his bathtub 15 years earlier.

A host of things must happen to make "Marat/Sade" a significant theatrical event. Wild comedy, vaudevillian chicanery, Brechtian song spots, the interaction of the inmate actors - the overlay of their sane madness and their mad insanity - all must be sculpted into an overwhelming breakthrough into an altered form of reality making the play at once a layered pastiche of human comedy and desparate tragedy. All those elements are thrown into Anderson's theatrical mix but with severely distorted results.

If, as Alfred Hitchcock liked to say, "a good movie is like life with the dull parts removed," playing crazy, as realitstic as a host of these Bruka performances perhaps are, does not add up to an interesting two and-one-half hours of theater. The production's constant barrage of wiggling oddities, looney shenanigans, poorly delivered lines, dreadfully sung songs and constant movement to nowhere goes nowhere.

And there's more. Bill Quinby's music direction, while better than his past efforts, is still not up to par. Nor is Dave Simpson's lighting, which leaves most everyone in the dark too much of the time, most especially the audience.

On the other hand, Lewis Zaumeyer's asylum set, the entire theater, is impressive. Likewise Lady Hull's costuming of a very large cast. Ditto lots of dedicated performers who learned lots of lines and sang lots of songs. But, alas, "Marat/Sade's" good points cannot overcome so much that's wrong.

How all too sad for de Sade.

"Marat/Sade" can be seen Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. through February 16, 2002, at the Bruka Theatre, 99 North Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada. For information call 775 323-3221.