 "Photo: Katherine Fan")
Three years after setting foot on campus, Texas' latest batch of MFA graduates leave the program with one final production: Peter Weiss' French revolution play "Marat/Sade." Opening today at the Oscar G. Brockett Theater on campus, the very serious and dark performance examines the effects of an oppressive system on the inmates of a mental asylum, albeit with Japanese influenced movements and a Brechtian style of performance.
Set in the Charenton mental asylum where the Marquis de Sade has been imprisoned for his radical writings, "Marat/Sade" is, at its core, a political debate about the revolution between the two lead characters.
"It is an allegory or any government of institution that sort of lives by oppression," director Kent De Spain said. "You see the violence in trying to maintain an oppressive system and the violence that comes in reaction to that oppression."
Considered by some to be an allegory for the French involvement in Vietnam, the play won several Tony awards for a Broadway production in the 1970s, and was even made into a movie by the play's director Peter Brook. On the surface, the story is a re-enactment of the murder of Jean-Paul Marat, a French revolutionary stabbed to death in his bathtub, with the asylum's inmates playing all of the characters in the play-within-the-play. While de Sade directs the play, the inmates of the asylum get more and more violent and need to be kept in check by the guards.
"It's very presentation and very Brechtian in its style," Blake Dulong, one of the actors in the play, said. There is a cage covering the stage, and the audience peers through the bars to look at the events taking place. Occasionally, the action stops on stage to highlight the violence inflicted upon the inmates.
"It is a very dark play, and it has cruel and sarcastic humor within it, " De Spain said. "Having the inmates play actors gives the play a darkness about it."
Many of the inmates are beaten by guards for getting out of control and forgetting their roles in the play, and the threat of violence is ever-present.
"What we've tried to do is set up this cage, so that when the audience comes in, they're the bourgeoisie class that would have come to these plays [in the mental asylum]," Dulong said.
Adding to the irony are the many musical numbers interspersed within the action. A quartet does most of the singing and confronts audience members sitting very close to the action. "Most of the fun is had by the quartet, which [would] sort of represent Greek chorus, if a Greek chorus was made up of drunken prostitutes." De Spain joked.
"Marat/Sade" opens tonight at the Oscar G. Brockett Theater and runs until Feb. 25, with additional performances on March 1-4. Tickets are $10 for staff at the UT Box Office.
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