A play by Peter Weiss. The full title of this play is: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Directiong of The Marquis de Sade. As you can tell from the title, it’s quite insane, but also quite amazing. The original English-language production of this play was by Peter Brook, who wrote the last book I read, and his essays were riddled with references to this play. I’m reading this with Ginny, so hopefully afterwards I will rethink some of my thoughts about it, but here are my initial impressions.

The play is exactly what the title suggests. The Marquis de Sade has written a play to be performed by his fellow inmates for the head of the asylum and his family. The performance consists of many episodes, monologues, songs, and so on. Every time the politics becomes too inflammatory, the authorities try to clamp down on it. The prisoners are supposed to doing this drama to rehabilitate them, but instead it serves to agitate them further. The scenes are often violent (Sade being whipped), grotesque (Marat picking at his scabs), and disturbing. The way in which the actions of the characters interact with the words they are speaking is really profound at times, which is one of the major strengths of the play.

I think that in order to really appreciate this play you have to be able to see it performed, and have an idea of what it might look like. A lot of the conventions Weiss uses are Brecht-like in nature, especially announcing the scenes, the actors commenting on the action, etc. But there is this incredibly rich extra layer that the actors are playing crazy people who are playing historical characters in this reenactment of Marat’s murder. As a result, the alienation works on multiple levels, and there are multiple “truths” to be found depending on how you want to interpret the action.

What I feel I learned the most from this play is that there are ways to make a series of images or tableaux almost to tell a story, and that the text can serve these images or it can accompany them, or even subvert them. That is, I shouldn’t feel obligated to cajole the text to serve up the images. The images form their own truth, and the text its own truth. I think if I rewrote A Head for Ganesh I would gut it and come up with some more images and do it almost in this style, but less insane/homicidal and more insane/burlesque. The beauty of the play was in its extremes.

I am particularly excited that Berkeley is doing Marat/Sade as the spring production, and that I have done a Brecht before and can sing. The goal is to get myself into a sufficiently prepared academic state so as to audition and get a part, because I think that doing this play could possibly be one of those life-altering theater experiences. That’s how I felt after doing Good Person of Sezuan, certainly.

Four essays by Peter Brook, a well-known director, about the Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate theater. Each of these essays is a little gem. Sometimes he rambles on, and sometimes he seems maybe too serious, but in the end, this book left me feeling more excited about the potential that theater has. When I read this the first time, two years ago, it made less of an impact on me, but rereading it brought much of what I have seen in the intervening time into sharper focus. Even when he is criticizing the state of Deadly modern theater, he points the way to new ideas and concepts. Or rather, they are old ideas and concepts that have been forgotten. I recommend this book to anyone who is getting bored with theater, or who feels like the whole endeavor is pointless.

On the other hand, it did make me feel like everything I have written so far is pretty much junk. I mean, it was good to write it, but I feel like I should be able to say something more in a play. Not that I must serve a Higher Purpose or something like that, but there are important things that I want to say, and I should really try to serve those in the writing. In that respect, the things that I have written before, and that I write now, are important to build technique, and i shouldn’t get so attached to them. The Empty Space is liberating in that respect as well.

I would label this as a must-read for just about anybody who cares about theater. In the book, he talks about the horrible state of contemporary theater (Deadly), the theater as ritual and elevating (Holy), in-your-face theater that uses all the dirt and grit of the brothel, barroom, and street (Rough), and his own approach to directing (Immediate). There are a lot of examples drawn from Brooks’ own experience that really help contextualize their comments. They aren’t thought experiments, they really happened. His exposition of Brecht and his importance is about the best explanation of “alienation” that I have read. His discussion of Shakespeare will make people who think the Bard pass&eacute sit up and take notice. The only drawback to the book is that the tone is a little too formal in its rhetoric, so sometimes pages have to be read and reread. Repetition, representation, assistance — that’s what it’s all about.

This is a slim novel that won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer for fiction. It tells the stories of five people who lost their lives when an old vine-and-board bridge collapsed in Peru. The Marquesa, Esteban the copyist, and Uncle Pio are all inhabitants of Lima, and all are connected in ways which the book manages to reveal very gracefully. The best thing about it is that these relationships don’t seem at all forced, and so seem all the more truthful. The whole thing is framed as an attempt to “set the record straight” about who these people were, their secret dreams and aspirations, and how they all came to be on the bridge on that fateful day.

I’m going to have to reread Our Town and The Skin of our Teeth now, to see if there are similarities between those and this novel, maybe in style.