The 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,” was first performed in 1964 in West Berlin. Written to dramatize the author’s doubts about the limits of art, revolution, the power of rhetoric, and the role of the writer in society, “Marat/Sade” ignited the world theater with its inventive structure and assault on the senses. Framed as a play within a play, Weiss’s text grapples with the ethics and poetics of the French Revolution as seen through the gaze of two of the era's most notorious provocateurs and a cast of prisoners.

Director Rachel Perlmeter is a cross-media artist who works in the interstitial spaces between theater, dance, sound, and installation art. In Minneapolis her work has been presented by the Playwrights’ Center, The Soap Factory, and the Dance Film Project at Intermedia Arts. She has a master’s degree in theater history and criticism from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a Fulbright artist and a TCG/International Theatre Institute fellow working with experimental theaters in Russia.

The production will also feature an original score and soundscape by guest composer J. Anthony Allen, in association with Noah Keesecker and Joshua Clausen. Lighting design is by Tom Barrett, costumes by Lynn Farrington, and scenic design by Macalester senior Natalie Khuen.