Director's Notes - 163 - Bravo

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Theater of Cruelty was a 20th Century theatrical style defined by Antonin Artaud. It's a cool name that overstates its premise that theater is more than just a live show, it's an immediate and passionate feeling. Acting, thus, must psychologically force the audience out of their comfort, violently disturbing the suspension of disbelief and distance of fiction. It's not quite breaking the fourth wall, but it can be that, too. 

One of the touchstones Theater of Cruelty is Peter Weiss's 1966 play "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" (or "Marat/Sade" as it's commonly truncated). The play is about exactly what the title suggests, and the actors must play insane inmates who are playing historical parts. 

The inmates often can't suppress their inner sociopathy, and the warden of the asylum has to keep them in check, often chastising the Marquis de Sade, who is on stage as well, overseeing his literary opus. It's all so meta, a play within a play, yada yada. 

I recently rewatched this play (the film version is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJc4I6pivqg), and it... um... it doesn't hold up. I mean, it's certainly still a solid example of expressionism and theater of cruelty for actors. It deals with class, certainly, which feels important today, but it makes hay with the rape jokes, and its broad approach to mental illness reduces the characters to psychopaths who cannot control themselves.

"Marat/Sade" doesn't work for me in 2020, like most 50+ year-old plays don't work. It's simply no longer of its time. Discussions around mental health, sexual assault, and class have advanced beyond the play script's discourse. Plus, Theater of Cruelty is an approach that's been so often folded into theater over the past 100 years, that it come across as unimaginative in its purest form. It's like enjoying chocolate cake and cookies and brownies and then suddenly biting into a 100% cocoa bar. 

I bring all of this up because in episode 163, "Bravo," we used this play as a jumping off point for the escape of Doug Biondi and the NTSB agents from the Asylum. When we first introduced the story of the Night Vale Asylum last December, we wanted to tread lightly around harmful insanity tropes*. We wanted to use the dangerous inmates of "Marat/Sade" but invert what makes them dangerous. It's not a generalized "craziness." In fact, in Night Vale's case, those inmates aren't insane at all. 

– Jeffrey Cranor
March 3, 2020

* I don't want to suggest that no one who is institutionalized for mental illness is dangerous. I only want to say that perpetuation of that is well-trod land.

//

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