'Quills' is a match for its scandalous subject

Doug Wright's over-the-top play is being given an over-the-top production by Luna Theater Company. Quills is about the over-the-top Marquis de Sade, who lent his name to sadism, sexual pleasure derived from inflicting pain, and who wrote novels of shocking, violent pornography.

Excess is the name of the game here: sexually, literarily, and theatrically. As Wright explains in his notes on style, "Characters are not good or bad; they are either kissed by God or yoked in Satan's merciless employ."

Wright goes on to recommend grand guignol stagecraft - blood, body parts, anything that can pile on the "grotesquerie." Director Gregory Scott Campbell meets these suggestions halfway. It's a talky play, and the first act threatens to make a debate between the Marquis (Robb Hutter) and the Abbé de Coulmier (Alan Holmes) - despite its scandalous topic - boring. But soon there are narratives of seductions and victimizations, along with actual seductions and victimizations, and things pick up considerably.

The scene is the notorious Charenton insane asylum sometime after the French Revolution and the ensuing Terror. The marquis has been in one prison or another most of his adult life; he is obsessively compelled to write his lurid stories, finding a devoted reader in laundry maid Madeleine (Nell Bang-Jensen). The doctor (Mark Knight) who runs this horrific institution has his own domestic troubles and connives money from Sade's wife (Sonja Robson), who is eager to be rid of the stigma of being married to the most scandalous man in Paris.

Things go to pieces - literally - as Sade is dismembered to keep him from writing. But he can always find a quill, if you take my meaning.

The play's theme is whether the word is the deed, whether an author is responsible for what he may inspire his readers to do. Government, medicine, religion, and marriage all come in for serious bashing, and the thrill of sexual torture brings Abu Ghraib to mind.

The cast takes its task seriously, delivering Wright's ornate dialogue in straight-faced declamatory high style. The sound design (Adam Vidiksis) is excellent and spooky, and the set (Dirk Durossette) provides a fine dungeon. And as venality trumps everything, the Abbé asks the central question: "Who have I become?"

Quills

Through Nov. 15 at Luna Theater Company, 620 S. Eighth St. Tickets $15-$25. Information: 866-811-4111 or www.LunaTheater.org.

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