Crazy for A Revolution

The madness of the French Revolution and the madness of the everyday overlap and intertwine in “Marat/Sade,” the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play, “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.” The production, which opens tonight and runs through November 7 at the Loeb Experimental Theater, tells the story of that infamous character for whom the term “sadism” was coined, the Marquis de Sade, and his internment at the Charenton Asylum shortly after the French Revolution. A play within a play, the show aims to combine its two settings—revolutionary Paris and an asylum fifteen years later—with an emphasis on the similarities between the seemingly disparate conditions.

The story is partially based on true events. In the early 19th century, Sade was indeed imprisoned in Charenton, where he staged performances using other inmates as actors. The play within “Marat/Sade” focuses on just one of these stagings: Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jean-Paul Marat at the height of the French Revolution’s political terror.

Originally in German, Weiss’ play saw its first English production in 1964, when it was taken up by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook. According to director James M. Leaf ’09-’10, this production had served as a commentary on the Cold War; Marat was used as an allegory for East Berlin, Sade as an allegory for the West. This particular interpretation, which pitted one titular character against the other, possesses little contemporary relevance in Leaf’s play, which lays its emphasis more on the relationship and similarities between the two characters, rather than on their opposition.

“I see Sade and Marat as much more closely allied in some ways,” Leaf says, who used the interplay of the two temporally-divided settings—the asylum and the revolution—to help create the bond.

According to Christine E. Gummerson ’12, who plays Rossignol, there are many parallels between the events in revolutionary France and the madhouse. “There is this feeling of ‘What have I done to deserve this? Why me?’” she says. In both situations, the victims—the poor and the mad, respectively—feel unfairly punished. With this injustice comes desperation, and it is desperation, Gummerson says, that can bring people to the terrifying violence that marked the revolution.

This violence is evident in the asylum as well, says Leaf. “A huge part of this play is the idea of violent demasking of violence and violence that’s made to look like help.” The brutality of the asylum’s overseers, which they claim is for the good of the inmates, mirrors the Parisian proletariat’s view of violence—epitomized by the guillotine and the storming of the Bastille—as a means to a better end.

“These people are put in an insane asylum,” says Elyssa K. Jakim ’10, who plays Charlotte Corday. “They’re punished for what they are rather than what they’ve done.” For Leaf, this division between crimes of action and crimes of being lies at the heart of the production. “If you can truly understand the difference between them,” he says, “you can understand the play.”

An understanding of “Marat/Sade,” therefore, relies on an appreciation of its complementary contexts. The production aims to use asylum and revolution to emphasize one another and comment on the present day. In doing so it hopes to show that violent desperation is timeless and that it can bring any of us—all of us—to the brink of insanity.