Playwright: Yukio Mishima,
translated by Donald Keene
At: European Repertory Company
at The Storefront, 66 E. Randolph St.
Phone: (312) 742-8497; $15
Runs through: Feb. 8
Yes, the play is titled Madame De Sade, and yes, it was written by a gay Japanese author who once had himself photographed as Saint Sebastian—tied to a tree, arrows sticking out of him, and everything. And it's true that this production features some of Chicago's hottest actresses, dressed in translucent gowns. But don't let this, or the spectacular scenic effects—free-standing elevators, billowing air-filled floors, a giant mural reproduction of Manfredi's 'The Chastisement of Cupid'—distract you.
Oh, all right—go ahead and let it distract you. The point that Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was attempting to make is that we are too bound by convention and need to, well, Get In Touch With Our Bodies. And since he was an aristocrat in pre-revolutionary France, he proceeded to put his abberative experiments into practice. Yukio Mishima's play explores Sade-ist principles from the perspective of the women in the marquis' life—his wife, her sister, his mother-in-law, their respectively virtuous and libidinous neighbors, and a lone maidservant—all of whom find their lives and consciousness irrevocably altered by their association with the volatile nobleman.
But if Mishima's theme is likewise the elevation of the flesh over the intellect—or rather, the achievement of spiritual transcendence through physical debasement—his text is surprisingly free of titillation. Inded, its language blends images both sacred and profane into rhapsodies whose lyrical density, while reconstituted with a poet's accuracy in Donald Keene's translation, could nonetheless have reduced the 2-1/2-hour evening to little more than a symposium on the nature of sensuality (re-defining the term 'oral sex').
And that's where Kirk Anderson's direction and Katrina Levitan's choreography come in: the women of European Repertory's cast—Laura Scott Wade, Dado, Carolyn Hoerdemann, Beth Lacke, Karen Kron and Kelly Yacono—pose prettily in their dainty garb and twirl like so many graceful water-lilies to keep the stage picture in motion throughout the play's three acts, meanwhile displaying a verbal sensitivity at once delicately intuitive and precisely disciplined. Whether this will win any converts to Sadism is uncertain, but one cannot help but applaud the worthiness of their efforts.