Marat/Sade

Right now, as I write this, we are in rehearsal for Shaw’s Misalliance. There is a wonderful little meta-theatrical moment in the play when one of the characters, a well-read philosophical type, who habitually calls upon those he is arguing with to read this or that author. He talks of evolution and says, “Read Darwin.” At one point he talks about The Superman and says “Read”—no, not Nietzsche—. He says “Read What’s-his-name.” What’s-his-name is, of course, Shaw, who wrote Man and Superman about six years before Misalliance. Man and Superman is about a writer, John Tanner, who has written an important essay called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” And Shaw wrote just such an essay and it is appended to copies of Man and Superman and it is as good as the play says it is.

Now, that’s unique. I know of no other playwright who has written about a great writer—a fictional great writer—and quoted his work or printed it. You can write about second-raters, and quote their work, but you cannot quote a fictional writer who is a better writer than you are.

The same thing is true about writing about playwrights or actors. As an actor I have played a playwright twice. I played Shaw in Dear Liar, a play about his affair with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and guess what? The character, Shaw, was as good a playwright as the real Shaw when I spoke his lines. And I have played Peter Quince, a writer, director, and actor in the Pyramus and Thisbe episode in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. And guess what: he was not as good an actor as me. How could he be? If I could portray an actor better than me I would do it all the time.

And that brings us to the most interesting play of our fourth season: Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. That’s not the real title. The real title 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. I played Marat.

Actually, I played an inmate of an asylum who had been cast as Marat in a play that Marquis de Sade had written and directed. The actors playing de Sade and the staff of the asylum were actually playing those roles. The rest of us were playing lunatics who were playing roles. We were actors acting actors acting. In our fifth season we did Dream and again we had actors playing very bad actors. But that was easy; it was all for laughs.

This was different. We were not going for laughs. We were going for pity and terror. And we were trying to evoke pity and terror by doing it inadequately. We couldn’t just over-act, and forget lines and props, and fall on our prats. (There’s a little of that written into the play, but very little.) We had to portray our lunatic actors as realistically and sympathetically as we could. We had to dramatize and make our audience understand the great questions the play deals with, but never resolves: de Sade’s desperate striving for an ascetic self-awareness and self-fulfillment that ultimately led to the sadism named for him; Marat’s desperate striving for liberty, equality, and a just government, a striving that ultimately led to a reign of terror. And we had to play unsympathetic, unattractive, deluded characters accurately, but in a way that made them sympathetic, attractive, and understandable.

There is very little in our training that prepares us for this sort of thing. The long shadows of Constantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasburg have fallen upon us and every American actor today is, at least partially, a ‘Method’ actor. When we prepare a role we explore the emotional life of the character by summoning up our own emotional life. We teach ourselves to use our sense memory to understand the feelings of the character. We read the lines and ask ourselves: what are they really saying. We read through the text into the ‘sub-text’ and let the secret, unspoken dialogue control how we act and react. We discover the ‘spine,’ the ‘through-line’ of the character. We come as close as we can (we tell ourselves) to becoming the characters, and let what they feel control what we do. And so we create, or try to create, authentic, realistic, consistent characters.

None of that works in this play. The two characters the Marat/Sade actor must play—the historical figure in the French revolution and the mad actor who portrays him—cannot be consistent. They are two different people. The historical figure may have really lived, and therefore is authentic and real, but he exists in the play only as the imaginary creation of a lunatic. The lunatics are purely fictional, but they are the characters the actor must portray truthfully.

But how? The actor cannot trust his sense memory, because he is playing someone whose emotional life does not find a counterpart in the actor. The actor would feel and respond in that way if this happened to him, but the point of the character is that he doesn’t respond that way: he is deranged.

And there is no way we can discover a sub-text because we really have no text. With a few exceptions the characters never speak for themselves; they recite lines they have memorized that de Sade has written for them.

So, a play like Marat/Sade—(Is there another play like Marat/Sade?)—asks a lot of the actor: great challenges and great rewards. The actors found their own ways of meeting the challenge. In some cases the nature of the mental illness that afflicted them is specified by the playwright—Peter Weiss, not de Sade—paranoia, sleeping sickness, melancholia, but in most cases the actors diagnosed themselves and diagnosed the severity of their condition. Some found they could pretend to immerse themselves in the character they played, and use the play as a way of escaping from whatever private horror they had. (Yes, there really are actors who do that—über-method actors—but our actors who made that choice were actually technical actors playing method actors.) Some decided the play was a lark and what they liked best about it was that they could misbehave and annoy their keepers. Some were patients who were unable to participate fully, but who heard the political messages of the play as statements about their own incarceration, and so they repeatedly lost control. Some were not mad at all, but were confined because they were an embarrassment to the state and to their well-placed families who managed to get them committed, rather than jailed. (Historically, this was de Sade’s case.) Each of us made our own choice, and the result, we hoped, would be a coherent production made out of incoherence and a single statement made out of contradiction.

Did it work? This is from the closing speech: