"MADAME DE SADE," European Repertory Company at the Storefront Theater
BY LUCIA MAURO
Yukio Mishima’s 1965 oratorio-style drama, "Madame de Sade," is a curious bundle of dichotomies – East vs. West; imperialism vs. democracy; pleasure vs. pain; debauchery vs. piety; apathy vs. involvement; hypocrisy vs. truth. They are presented in such broad, obvious – and redundant – strokes that they resound with the force of a sharp whip crack (an equally predictable sound-design choice). European Repertory Company has selected a surprisingly tedious work for its debut at the Storefront Theater in Gallery 37 for the Arts.
The play, which runs nearly three hours (enough to tax the most diehard sadomasochist), posits the label of infamous French libertine, the Marquis de Sade, as a monster of immorality against the monstrous devotion of his wife, Renee. The Marquis appears only through the words of Renee and five intersecting women (both real and metaphoric). Renee remains committed to her husband while he languishes in prison – under the duplicitous power of Renee’s title-obsessed mother, Madame de Montreuil, who pretends to petition for the Marquis’ release at the same time she makes sure he stays locked up for good.
Far from a linear biographical piece, "Madame de Sade" revels in ironic agendas. Mishima – a Japanese writer who hung suspended between various ideologies, both sexual and political, and committed hara-kiri in 1970 as an homage to the imperialist Samurai code – seems to argue against the hypocrisy of the French aristocrats. Yet he weaves in darker threads of the impending French Revolution via Madame de Montreuil’s increasingly defiant servant Charlotte.
Like the Marquis de Sade, Mishima chastises persons of virtue and celebrates vice – or, more accurately, finds virtue in vice. He defends, romanticizes and deifies his hero’s freedom of expression but ignores the many drugged prostitutes and servants who landed in a pool bloodied by the Marquis’ countless lashes of a nail-studded whip.
The play begins in a rather hackneyed devil/angel fashion, with the sexually unquenchable Countess de Saint-Fond (in red) recounting the salacious adventures of De Sade to the seemingly saintly Baroness de Siamiane (in more celestial colors). The Baroness, of course, ends up salivating over these stories that entwine pleasure and pain. And, of course, the effect is that all of us really crave knowledge of the most perverse sexual fantasies.
But, strangely, the graphic description of orgies and a kinky black mass and De Sade’s sister Anne’s dalliances with the Marquis in Venice grow quite dull – especially in this play’s stiff presentational format. This gnawing tedium continues through Renee’s extended tirades on devotion and her on-again, off-again rebellion directed at her domineering and ambitious mother. The third act literally tries to join sexual ecstasy with religious ecstasy via the Baroness de Siamiane who is now a nun – a vocation Renee herself considers.
But, in true sadomasochistic fashion, the playwright gives us no true release or satisfaction. After all, Renee – who has remained steadfast in her loyalty to her husband while he’s wasted away in prison – refuses to ever see him again once he’s released. We, too, are tugged and jostled and probed and, in a disturbing sense, bound within the writer’s warped and exhaustive tantric prison.
When the Countess de Saint-Fond (who is later trampled to death while dabbling in prostitution among the lower classes) proclaims, "This sickness has roses under its surface," the whole experience becomes unbearably nauseating. The chronic juxtaposition of opposites gets hammered into audiences with the impact of a relentless flogging – and the effect is no longer pain, but numbness.
Director Kirk Anderson has embarked on an ambitious – but ultimately clunky and unfulfilling – journey. Opening night was fraught with flubbed lines and awkward pacing – more shocking when one considers the fine caliber of actresses in the cast. Laura Scott Wade turns in the most sincere and multitiered performance as Renee – subtly bridging that elusive abyss separating devotion from self-indulgence; sanctity from sexual excess. Beth Lacke adds rays of humor and self-satire to the role of Renee’s carefree and envious sister, Anne.
Carolyn Hoerdemann, with her dazzling eyes and sultry voice, is ideally cast as the renegade Countess de Saint-Fond. But she often falls prey to over-acting and an anticlimactic delivery. Karen Kron’s Baroness de Siamiane borders on caricature, but Kelly Yacono adds devious non-verbal dimensions to the maid, Charlotte. Yet it was most difficult for me to come to terms with Dado – a gifted director and actress who is visibly pregnant – as the scheming Madame de Montreuil. It’s not that Dado’s pregnancy is particularly distracting. She simply has not yet defined her character which, at present, veers between tired buffoon and invincible matriarch – coupled with wildly wavering diction problems.
Joey Wade’s most clever design touch is the sense that the artists are both sculptures in an atelier and floating chess pieces on an earthy-ethereal chess board. Renee’s scooping up of a corner of the painting’s canvas that transforms into her embroidery achieves a more powerful interweaving of creative expression, monotony … and pain … than most of Mishima’s verbose script. The crumbling chandelier with its melting candles also brings the audience to the brink of illumination, decay…and pain.
Greg Essex’s lighting flickers across the ghoulish and heavenly. And Michelle Lynette Bush’s transparent 18th century costumes reveal the cages encircling these women’s sensuality. Even Madame de Montreuil has a small bird cage jutting from her wig. Most beguiling is the opening pageant, choreographed by Katrina Levitan, in which the women flit about like ghosts to fragmented Baroque music – negotiating between delicacy and disdain.
But these brief moments of mesmerizing beauty get doused in Mishima’s excruciating exposition on a brutal form of sexual liberation. Here, form marrying function is a precarious union – especially for non-sadistically-inclined audiences who have to sit through this torture.
European Repertory Company’s production of "Madame de Sade" runs through February 8 at the Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph. Tickets: $15. Call 312-742-TIXS.
