Puente Theatre Presents Wordplay 2014: Marat/Sade

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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
8:00 PM

Wordplay is a festival of staged readings from around the world.

Marat/Sade by: Peter Weiss
Translated by: Geoffrey Skelton with lyric adaptation by Adrian Mitchell
Directed by: Julian Cervello

Marat/Sade (Germany)

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, usually shortened to Marat/Sade, is a 1963 play by Peter Weiss.

The work was first published in German. Incorporating dramatic elements characteristic of both Artaud and Brecht, it is a bloody and unrelenting depiction of class struggle and human suffering which asks whether true revolution comes from changing society or changing oneself. Marat/Sade is set in 1808 and concerns a performance by members of the asylum in which the Marquis de Sade was incarcerated from 1801 to 1814. At the warden�s suggestion, de Sade directs his fellow inmates in a dramatic re-creation of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. What follows is an intense dialectical contest between de Sade and Marat. According to Weiss, de Sade personifies anarchy, self-indulgence, and individualism, while Marat, a pre-Marxist revolutionary, believes that the end justifies the means, no matter how violent the means may be.