Theater!

Rummaging around to choose some books for donating, came across a slim volume with fluttering pages, held together by a disintegrating rubber band...

The play by Peter Weiss: "Marat/Sade" or "The Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of St. Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade". A mouthful of a title.
I have seen the movie version--well done, but not truly mesmerising.
I have seen 2 Theater versions: a college production- insipid, definitely not mesmerizing!
BUT then a few months later.
At the Loretto Theater/ Webster University with a cast of, 'half and half', professionally experienced actors and talented acting students. Set in stark black and white, with some grey, brilliantly, almost glaringly lit, perfectly played on a 'theater in a round' stage, that reached into the audience. The sense, the audience in the house and the one on stage is US, was simply overpowering. That was 21 years ago, and I still can see it. Such IS the power of a great play put on and acted out perfectly!

So, I reread it for the nth time (the reason for those loose pages).

Again I was struck by its deeply disturbing satire on human conditions.
The Inmates (St. Charenton is / was an Insane Asylum in France) appear saner than the audience in this play. And even saner than some of the living in our time! Reading the play the first time, even then I felt the author Peter Weiss meant this as an indictment of humanity's insensitivity to horrors.

It simply cries out to become an opera, having all necessary ingredients for a successful one:
sadistic Director (;-), Revolution, Murder, Lust, Revenge, Madness, Horrors, plenty occasions for dramatic arias, crazed 'actors', and lastly, an on-stage 'audience' so satiated with normalcy, their greed for anything to titillate, however scurrilous, becomes all pervasive! And in the end the 'inmate' actors and 'normal' audience are no longer distinguishable - who IS sane and who IS NOT! It ought to be an opera.....

I am thinking Corrigliani as composer or perhaps Golijov. Definitely NOT Glass. Maybe Hegie could do it, but his music seems not be quite dramatic enough.
Where is a Mascagni, a Verdi, a Stravinsky, or a Mussorgsky?