Marat/Sade Underground

A staged reading of the theatrical drama can be very bare-bones. Very minimalist. Or it can be very elaborate. Pink banana Theatre Company and The World's Stage Theatre's reading of Marat/Sade this past weekend bled over into the more elaborate end of the spectrum with a fully-scored musical background and very vivid costuming. 

The show was billed as one that infused "punk, rock, live music," and such. Music Director Colleen Schmitt worked with a musical sounds good that included the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop the Beatles Come Together and a few other elements. And while it didn't quite conjure the kind of frazzled tumultuous energy that it could have, it added to things quite dramatically.

The play tells the story of a drama of revolution staged by a group of inmates at an insane asylum. Jeff Kriesel played with a remarkably tempered poise in the role of the Marquis de Sade. Tim Palacek exhibited a similarly charismatic sense of control in the role of the inmate playing Jean-Paul Marat. Amanda Carson played with subtlety and nuance in the role of Charlotte. In order to bring across, she has to filter all of her emotion through a narcoleptic kind of exhaustion. And through it Carson managed to develop remarkable range of different emotions including Passion, lust and frustration.

The reading could be criticized for compromising the play-within-a-play structure as it can detract from the overall feel of a fully-rehearsed play being presented . . . the delicious sense of the chaotic is lost to the books perhaps . . . indeed, this would have been a major distraction for me had it not been for the fact that there were some really interesting performances here. Matt Roth was suitably pompous as the hospital administrator. There were interesting performances by promising young actors including Carole Alt, Marcus Beyer and Zach McClain. And David Bohn makes another really sharp appearance here in the role of the Herald. 

What really fascinated me here, though, was the chorus--listed in the script as the Four Singers--patients at the institution who served to help set tone and mood. It would have been really easy to play these characters as sympathetic (or unsympathetic) stereotypes of the mentally ill. And while that would've been fine in context, what was done for this particular stage reading was much more interesting. And it actually took my attention away from much of the rest of the play. And I can't say that I was disappointed by it in the least. Each of the Four Singers had her own clearly identifiable disorder. Each one served a drastically different tone to create this beautifully stylish discordant harmony. 

The most active of these was easily the most frenetic performance on stage by any actor her. Liz Faraglia played a woman with a deep and disturbing obsessive-compulsive thing going on. She scratched all over her body constantly and kept counting to four under her breath over and over again. She kept this up throughout the entire production. Counting to four. And scratching. As an actor if you have to make a decision to play a role like this you really have to commit to it. Especially on a studio theater stage. Because any deviation from the compulsion is going to look really flat and obvious. . . it's going to look like the act that it is. It's not going to be convincing at all. Faraglia commits to the OCD all the way and it's kind of overwhelming. At her best, Faraglia has an infectious magnetic aspect to her stage presence which makes the effect of the disorder all the more intense. Those of us sitting in the front row or on the aisles occasionally made eye contact with her. It was like she was diving right into your soul all thorns and barbs scratching all the way down. Haunting. 

Gwen Zupan played someone afflicted with rapidly cycling mood swings. Of course, the tendency to over-exaggerate everything in such a character has to be intense, but Zupan played it remarkably understated. With Faraglia we already had ONE really intensely physical disorder onstage. Put too many of them up there and it'll completely drown-out the plot. So she just sat there and quietly drifted from one extreme to the next. There was an occasional laugh. It was fascinating to watch her face become a place where emotions happen rather than one with a cohesive identity behind it. And every now and again there was that chilling laugh.

Mara McGhee played to the manic end of mental illness to the extreme. Very happy and very cheerful no matter what. And so much energy. And there might have been the temptation to throw-in a kind of darkness into the happiness . . . kind of a twisted smile, but she played it sweet and friendly all the way through even when she was delivering very dark lines . . . so her instincts were really good here as well. 

Tamsyn Cougar-Reed played a very subdued end of the spectrum . . . much like Zupan's role, only much, much more sedated. Her contrast was really interesting. In relationship to such extremes, one had to wonder what kind of seriously severe therapy they'd been putting her character through and how much worse she must have been to have warranted such intensely debilitating "treatment." Cougar-Reed could have gone for something more obvious . . . more wild, but the four part discord had to have something even subtler than Zupan's performance to balance out the extremes of McGee and Faraglia. 

This was a really fun collaboration between Pink Banana and The World's Stage. Looking forward to more from both of them in the near future. . . 

Pink Banana Theatre/World's Stage's reading of Marat/Sade was a one-weekend-only affair. Pink Banana Theatre's 2013 Season gets announced at 7pm on March 14that the Underground Collaborative on 161 West Wisconsin Avenue. World's Stage's next show is Waiting--A Song Cycle by Bob Kelly and Kelly Pomeroy--a musical journey following five couples as love is found and lost.