Anyone who’s been around young children, knows how much they like to watch the same thing over and over. So I was never bored seeing plays over and over again as a young child, and I often knew many of the lines from the plays. I got to see every single play, until 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 by Peter Weiss, or Marat/Sade for short.
You see after The Playboy of The Western World by John Millington Synge, I got up on a pew in church one Sunday, and very loudly proclaimed, “Glory be to God, I’m crazy again!” One of my father’s line’s from that play.
So my parents decided that perhaps Marat/Sade was not a good play for me to see at 6 years old.
My older sister Vivian was in Marat/Sade, and sang several of the songs in the play. She didn’t think twice about practicing her lines and songs around my niece (who is three years younger than me) until one day in the grocery store my niece began to sing, “What’s the use of a revolution without general, general, general copulation.”
Maturity is after all, about knowing what you shouldn’t sing or shout in public.