Friday, February 20, 2004

By Katherine Karlin

Anyone who has had to sit through "Les Miserables" should be rewarded with the Playhouse Conservatory Company's production of "Marat/Sade." Peter Weiss's 1964 play is as cerebral as the Broadway blockbuster is sentimental, sharp where "Les Miz" is mushy. This is the revolution without tears.

	'Marat/Sade' Where: Playhouse Conservatory at the Pittsburgh Playhouse of Point Park University, 222 Craft Ave., Oakland. When: Through Feb. 29; Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $12-$14. 412-621-4445.

Don't be intimidated by the full title, which is "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." Don't be put off by the work's enshrinement as an "important play." Under John Shepard's production, the exuberant young cast of Point Park undergraduates performs with an urgency that cracks wide open any calcification that might have hardened the work in the past 40 years.

The play is a system of Chinese boxes that places the audience in different eras. At its heart is the story of Jean-Paul Marat, the French revolutionist, who, attended by his faithful wife, Simone, scribbles feverishly in his bathtub trying to soothe a debilitating skin disease. Charlotte Corday, a grieving daughter of the aristocracy, comes to execute him with a dagger.

But Marat's tale is performed not by an acting troupe, but by the patients of a lunatic asylum, 15 years after the event. The director is the asylum's most glamorous inmate, the Marquis de Sade (now the citizen Mr. de Sade). The hospital's director, Coulmier, has invited an audience to the production to show off his modern reforms, and he and his hawk-like wife perch on the side of the stage, ready to excise any slanders against the Emperor Napoleon or the church. (You may know all this context better from the recent play and film about de Sade at Charenton, "Quills.")

Although the inmates reflect the Napoleonic era, the Coulmiers are clearly in the present, underscored by Mrs. Coulmier's smart pants suit and by their daughter, who videotapes the proceedings. The Coulmiers' contemporary appearance implicates us; their breakneck oscillation among liberal indulgence, fear, disgust and hostility would be laughable if it weren't so familiar.

Still another era frames the play -- that of "Marat/Sade's" first production, in 1964 Berlin. As the inmates re-enact the bloody events of two decades earlier, and the show's Herald (a leering Missy Moreno) offers disclaimers that the men responsible for the butchery are dead and that present company is far more civilized, we can't help but wonder how the initial audiences responded to the lunatics' anguished memories of corpses beneath their feet.

The play is, in addition, a musical, and the long talks between Marat and de Sade (which echo the political poles of Stalinism and fascism) are punctuated by unexpectedly joyous numbers, imaginatively choreographed by Kiesha Lalama-White and led by a Greek chorus of Brittany Ullrich, Jacinda Rose Swinehart, Mark Turner and Anna Malinoski.

As de Sade, Kevin Koch is a smoothly seductive villain. John Magaro's Marat grows stronger as he draws near death. Christina Lynn Phillips' Simone, a medical compendium of tics, is barely audible at times. And Halavah Sofsky plays Duperret, whose evident ardor for Charlotte -- with the help of either costume design or one of the new pharmaceutical products on the market -- never seems to flag.

As for Charlotte, the lovely Chelsey Shannon, her features blurred with sleep, is heartbreakingly vulnerable.

It's natural to wonder if such a young cast can pull off so sophisticated a play: This production makes you think "Marat/Sade" should always be performed by teens and twenty-somethings. Whereas an older cast might approach 40-year-old experimental theater with a touch of tired irony, these performers bring nothing but passion and discovery. The ideas and the method of presentation are fresh. When Sam Rhodes, as the angriest of the inmates, pleads with the audience to do something, you may feel a jolt of electricity. It's theater.

Katherine Karlin is a freelance writer.

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