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Ideal setting, strong acting can't quite break 'Sade' free

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 22, 2006 at midnight

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The setting for Marat/Sade is ideal: a black-box theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts has been blocked off from the audience by a wall of bars, turning the entire stage into a prison cell. It's a dark and cold image, and one that reinforces the theatricality of Peter Weiss's 1964 play.

But despite this fine setting and interesting staging by Joan Kuder Bell, Marat/Sade fails to achieve the visceral reaction the denouement requires.

The full title of Weiss's play is its straightforward description: 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.

De Sade was, in fact, an inmate at Charenton, along with the mad, the politically inexpedient and the socially unacceptable. His time there is the subject of Doug Wright's later play, Quills. This play, though, is less about de Sade than about revolution, the impulse toward anarchy and violence, and the ruling class' means of imposing order.

The entire play consists of the play within, performed as it is by the asylum inmates 19 years after the French Revolution and 15 after the death of Marat, a revolutionary who led the Reign of Terror. The inmates, in various stages of functionality, are directed in this undertaking by de Sade, played with frosty remove by James Maxwell.

They include the narcoleptic, depressive woman playing Charlotte Corday, Marat's murderer. Alice Evans gives the production's finest performance, a lenticular portrayal of both the reticent actress and the seething killer.

Jeff Kraus gives a small but noteworthy performance as Duperret, Corday's friend who is played by a lecherous, truly disturbing inmate.

Inmates provide music as well, composed by Richard Peaslee and delivered on flute, accordion and piano. It's not the most melodic of scores, as would be expected by the residents of an asylum.

While Bell constructs impressive tableaus from her large cast, she doesn't create the kind of momentum required. Rather than seem inevitable, what should be a shocking finish to the play comes from nowhere and disappears just as quickly.

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. or 303-954-5101