My invitation to consult to a theater production was itself a theatrical moment. Having discussed some plays as part of a standing liaison between the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and the American Repertory Theater of Cambridge, I was flattered to be invited to a lunch—they said to clear some hours—with the Hungarian director, Janos Szasz, to discuss his plans for the first major American staging of the Peter Weiss play, Marat/Sade, since the famous Peter Brook production of the 1960s.
Marat/Sade is set in the Charenton Asylum in 1808, 15 years after the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. The Marquis de Sade, confined to the asylum, dramatizes the assassination as an entertainment for the asylum directors, using the patients as actors. The revolutionary fervor of the play spreads to the performers and general mayhem ensues.
As best as I could understand, the director had spent time in a Hungarian asylum as a fulfillment or alternative to his military service. He wanted to speak to a psychoanalyst about staging a play in an asylum. I took the liberty to pitch a production that would emphasize psychological nuance over stylized ideological debate. He said, “We are seeing the same play.”
After lunch he asked me to accompany him to their rehearsal space. In the basement of a church the entire company and school were gathered in seats around two chairs. One was for the director, the other, I learned, was for me. He introduced me as his “assistant director” and explained that, for the next two hours, I would be discussing with them the nature of madness and asylums while viewing Frederick Wiseman's documentary about the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, Titicut Follies. As suddenly as that, I was on.
In the ensuing weeks, I worked with each member of the cast, 37 of them, as they developed the characters that would populate the asylum. Initial discussions about the credibility of their simulations of mania, rituals, depression, and perversions evolved into more nuanced discussions about the possible penetration of internal fantasy into external behaviors, the use of reality distortions to manage anxiety, and the use of symptoms as communications. Relationships developed and, with them, the sidebar dramas of parallel process, including the parallel between the attempt to develop the performance that would please the “blank screen” director and the attempts of the “inmates” to figure out how to live in a complex and dangerous world.
I have never found the simulation of madness interesting except to the extent that it reveals the assumptions underlying the ideas about madness that inform the performance. The actors demonstrated an uncanny ability, however, to develop highly specific imaginings that translated into performances capable of evoking a wide range of powerful affects in the audience. The final production—it was stunning—was as complex and layered in its way as an analytic hour. Having witnessed the creative process, it was possible to see in the still evolving product the compression of the extensive past efforts, mistakes and growth, and the general direction of the unpredictable future.