Sade case New Rep dips its Quills BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Quills By Doug Wright. Directed by Rick Lombardo. Set by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by John R. Malinowski. Sound by Rick Lombardo. With Steven Barkhimer, Kevin Landis, Rachel Harker, Benjamin Evett, Austin Pendleton, and Marianna Bassham. At New Repertory Theatre through February 6.

Who knew the Marquis de Sade would become such a fixture of 20th-century drama, the asylum at Charenton nestled next to the final destination of Blanche DuBois and the bailiwick of Nurse Ratched? First there was Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss’s savage 1964 Brechtian musical pitting the eloquent libertine against the bathtub-ridden martyr of the French Revolution. Then, in 1995, came Doug Wright’s Quills, a savagely ironic condemnation of censorship that imagines the last days of the infamous author of 120 Days of Sodom in a manner that leaps beyond Theatre of Cruelty to the Théâtre du Grand Guignol, which was popular in early-20th-century Paris, specializing in rape, murder, and terrorizing special effect.

Rick Lombardo and New Repertory Theatre had already enjoyed success in this vein with their chamber Sweeney Todd. Now, the director and his troupe have taken on the difficult, arch, yet horrifying circus of soft porn and censoriousness that is Quills. And if all you’ve seen is the 2000 film starring Geoffrey Rush as the notorious Sade, be assured that the play is a much more stylized black-comic beast that’s displayed here in a tight, ghoulishly decorated cage. Although the performance is uneven, the production is a treat in which The Phantom of the Opera duels with sexual fever: it’s organ versus organ, the action permeated with the melodramatic swells of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite instrument as Austin Pendleton’s wry nebbish of a Sade, stripped of his brocade and bows, spends half the play casually displaying the self-described font of his character’s inspiration. (He sure didn’t run around naked and spinning libidinous fairy tales in The Muppet Movie.)

Quills first brought wide attention to Wright, whose precisely effective I Am My Own Wife won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. The play takes the fact of Sade’s incarceration at Charenton for the last 11 years of his life and runs wild with it, presenting an increasingly perverse and sensational scenario in which freedom of expression dukes it out against mounting civic and religious repression. Does anything go in art, the play asks, or should the Natural Born Killers argument that imagined violence begets real prevail? And Wright has the guts to illustrate the debate in visceral detail.

The Abbé de Coulmier has, it seems, run a lax but humane ship at Charenton previous to the introduction of Dr. Royer-Collard, who’s been appointed by Napoleon to keep the inmates from rippling the waters of public opinion. Most egregious of Coulmier’s disciplinary lapses has been his failure to silence Sade’s pornographic imaginings: the marquis continues to scribble violent sexual fantasies in his comfortable quarters, smuggling some out for publication. Pressured by Royer-Collard, Coulmier confiscates the prisoner’s paper and those writing implements of the title, his quills. But as Sade pronounces early on, "Where there’s a will there’s a way, and a maniac is matchless for invention." He moves from writing on bedsheets in wine to defacing the walls with more-bodily fluids, in Wright’s reading less determined to give voice to his smutty visions than to test the limits of artistic freedom. In the end, you can’t keep a bad man down, separate him though you might from both means and (quite literally) ends.

Quills is as hard to pull off in tone as in technique, with its mix of lurid melodrama, baroque comedy riddled with double entendre, pathos, and polemic. Lombardo chooses to embrace rather than to ameliorate the extremes of the piece, much of which is written in the florid manner of Sade’s more mediocre exercises in literary shock. So we get bloody corpses swinging in harness, shadow-puppet plays involving saws and cleavers, and witty repartee at war with sturm und drang. Richard Chambers shoehorns it all into a set both gothic and quaint and glowing with the color of blood. And as the increasingly crazed Coulmier, Benjamin Evett takes his character on a descent from reasoned humanity to insane barbarity that’s both affecting and in line with the acerb, over-the-top trajectory of the play.

Marianna Bassham, as the pert laundress who hangs on Sade’s salacious tales as a respite from a hard-knock life, combines innocence with knowingness — and throws in a cameo as Royer-Collard’s saucy dominatrix of a bride. As Royer-Collard, however, a comically polished Steven Barkhimer is more bullying buffoon than threat, as silkily swollen as his waistcoat and delivering most of his lines directly to the audience.

As for Austin Pendleton, he’s an adventurous actor, to be sure, and at 64 closer to Sade’s age in 1807 (when the play is set, seven years before the real marquis died in his sleep) than the film’s Geoffrey Rush. But he plays the character as a sly, audacious imp bereft of any danger. When cast to type, as he was in the 1997 Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, he’s excellent. But here you admire his nerve more than his performance in a play that nonetheless makes you shudder as it makes you think.