'Marat/Sade' actors offer compelling performances in dual roles

Marat/Sade opened last night with a dynamic, powerful performance of the play that was written about the 1793 French Revolution and its raging consequences 15 years after it began. The play is set in an insane asylum, the Charenton Mental Hospital, in France in 1808. It is constructed as a play within a play, in which the inmates of the hospital act out the assassination of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, an inmate in the asylum. From the moment the audience stepped into the theater, the reality of entering an asylum took hold. The program welcomed the members to the hospital, ushers thrust lap robes for the viewers to don and restless patients circled the brightly lit stage. The realities of the asylum setting magnified as the actors forcefully depicted pathetic, hopeless patients dangling from the hospital rafters and roaming in and out of curtained cubicles. Distinctions between the real and unreal, the sane and insane blurred and disappeared altogether as the drama the inmates performed depicted a more truthful view of revolutionary ideology than the revolution taking place outside the walls of the asylum. College senior Jeff Morrison, in the role of the Marquis de Sade, maintained intensity and conviction, capturing the deeply disturbed, painfully brilliant, suffering awareness of the revolutionary figure. College senior Kent Davis was incredibly convincing as Jean-Paul Marat. Davis succeeded in his dual role as a victim of a tormenting skin disease given the task of portraying a disillusioned revolutionary. College senior Lori Horowitz, performing the part of the fragile, desirable Charlotte Corday, came across as the intensely disturbed, passionate victim of melancholy who plays a central part of the drama. The singing inmates and the Herald, played by Marc Goodman, framed and explained the plot as it became increasingly complex, intertwining the drama of the assassination with the perfomance as a whole. Inmates, nurses, guards, and directors portrayed laughter, pain, hysteria, fear, and disappointment at varying levels of intensity that carried the audience through the drama of the French Revolution and the political and social consequences of ongoing war and confusion 15 years later. Marat/Sade will be performed tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Harold Prince Theatre.

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