Insanity, mayhem take center stage in IU Theatre’s ‘Marat/Sade’

“We want our revolution now,” cry the patients of the Charenton asylum.
Sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered, sometimes sung, the statement reverberates throughout the play “Marat/Sade,” produced by the IU Department of Theatre and Drama and directed by Dale McFadden.

The show will have additional performances this week.

The show opens with the patients of the modern-day asylum, played by IU students, bewildered at the audience they attracted. Dressevd in colorful, elaborate costumes made with everything from fancy fabrics to plastic spoons and spare surgical gloves, the inmates take their places as the asylum director welcomes the audience to the show.

The play within a play, written and produced by the Marquis de Sade, tells the story of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a leader of the French Revolution. Charlotte Corday, played by an inmate with sleeping sickness, visits Marat three times before she successfully stabs him to death.

Marat’s assassination is paused several times, sometimes for debates between Marat and Sades and sometimes by the patients’ musical pleas to Marat for a revolution.
And when the players’ acting pushes them to the brink of noisy insanity, the asylum director herself interrupts the show, warning Sade to keep his actors in line and avoid saying anything the audience might find discomforting.

With mental patients for actors, the characters are unpredictable, and the lines between their characters and their insanity are constantly blurred, creating a show that sophomore Samantha Raab said was “very strange and eccentric, but interesting” and “captivating.”

As “Marat/Sade” is itself a play within a play, more lines between reality and fiction are blurred, an aspect of the show that sophomore Katie Groneman said she enjoyed.
“It confused me a little bit at first, but it became a lot more clear as it went on,” Groneman said.

Junior Matt Herndon said he was impressed with the actors’ “ability to stay inside all that crazy madness going on all over the place, but to keep the story moving along too.”

Herndon, who said he is a frequent theater-goer, said he also was very impressed with the cast.

“I had high hopes coming into this show, and it actually lived up to all of the hype,” Herndon said. “In order to pull off this play, you have to have a cast that is on their game all the time. And I think this cast was able to do that tremendously, and it really helped this play and this
production.”