Jean Marie Apostolidès is Professor of Drama at Stanford University. He is the author of Le Roi-machine, La Nauf des fous, Le Prince sacrifié, L'Affaire Unabomber, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord, L'Audience, Traces, revers, écart, and Les Métamorphoses de Tintin. His books HŽro•sme et victimisation & HergŽ et le mythe du surenfant are forthcoming (in 2003) by Exils Editeur in Paris.

Introduction:
Howlings in Favor of Sade

I

Written in 1990, performed between the end of May and the beginning of June 1991, this play is today no more than the bare bones of a piece of performance art that was important at the time it took place, and achieved a certain iniquitous glory on the campus of Stanford University. The roots of this project lie in an initial meeting I had with Babak Ebrahimian, who at that time was a second-year doctoral student in the Drama Department where I was currently teaching. Iranian by birth, yet having lived most of his life in the United States, Babak was passionately interested in avant-garde theatre. He had just completed a run of Heiner MÙller's Hamletmachine, with a brio that cut through the usual banalities of university productions. Influenced by Antonin Artaud, he sought to develop a new aesthetic which he called "Filmtheatre". I, for my part, was exploring the mise en tableau, a concept which served as a vital lead in the different shows I directed during a ten-year period (1992-2002) in the United States. Complementing the mise en scène, the mise en tableau consists of inserting tableaux animés which visually translate the unconscious of the text into the staged performance. This technique was for me the solution to the gap existing between the paucity of contemporary productions and the intellectual richness which the theoretical tools of nouvelle critique now allowed us to discover in a classical text. How could all that Marxism, psychoanalysis or structuralism might reveal within a text be visually translated onto a stage? The invention of tableaux based on a surrealist aesthetic seemed to me then - and still does today - to be one of the most promising solutions to these problems, permitting the visual level of the representation to be adjusted to the in-depth understanding of literary critique.

A quick exchange of thoughts brought us to the same conclusion - that, apart from the differences in our age and education, Babak and I shared an aversion to theatre as it was usually performed in an American university milieu. We therefore decided to join forces and stage productions which would explore a new and different rapport between the image and the text. Our first collaborative effort was a staging of Chekhov's Wedding, which was performed at Stanford University's Nitery in 1990. While this same project was ongoing, Babak requested that I write an original play for him, which he would direct the following year. I would serve as his dramaturg, our collaboration to cover all aspects of the production. We were both haunted by the specter of the avant-garde. For my part, I was simultaneously working on the importance of the image in XXth century avant-garde movements, in particular Surrealism and the International Situationist.[1] The creation of tableaux allowed me to use the image as the core of my theatrical practice, while still remaining aware of its seductions and its traps. Moreover, my discovery of the work of Annie Le Brun, whose Appel d'Air I was at that time translating together with Anita Habdank-Kolaczkowska, had convinced me that, were a new avant-garde to emerge, it would have to link the contradictory Surrealist and International Situationist inheritances, while simultaneously taking into account the new rapport between theatre and society.[2]  Vindicated by all the avant-garde movements of the XXth century, the Marquis de Sade presented himself as the individual most likely to provoke scandal. Prior to this, there had been the grand tribute of Jean Benoit, L'execution du testament du marquis de Sade, presented during the Surrealist exhibition of 1959. My perspective on this would be different, as the performance of the Canadian artist made it impossible to reproduce.[3] My choice would eventually consist in leaving the floor as much as possible to the Marquis, intervening as little as possible, while interjecting images between the audience and the words of the reviled Marquis himself.  Rather than adapt one of his literary works, I decided to compose a text based upon the multiple letters he wrote while incarcerated in the Chäteau de Vincennes. In this way, the gap between life and literature would be reduced to a minimum.

At the beginning, we had intended to stage this production in Stanford's Little Theatre (nowadays known as Pigott Theatre). My text was thus written in such a manner as to incorporate all the possibilities offered by this Italian-type stage. But Babak's incessant provocations resulted in his being fired by the Drama Department even before he could successfully stage this, his third-year production. In order to complete his doctoral degree, it was necessary to re-inscribe him into the Department of French Literature, while the doors of the Little Theatre were now closed to him, as were the scenery and costume shops. As it happened, these very impediments forced us to find new solutions, and ultimately the staged production was infinitely more innovative and provoking than it would have been, had we had the support we expected from the Drama Department.

II

At the time of the creation of Stanford University at the end of the XIXth century, Mrs Stanford, the spouse of the political figure who had designated his entire fortune to the founding of this academic institution, was very much concerned with the morality of the students. In order to avoid what she considered to be the coarse demands of nature, which might detract from the noble aims of the establishment, ie. the intellectual and spiritual development of its young people, this good lady had decreed that all the lavatories of her university be located on the periphery of those buildings dedicated to Higher Learning, not within them. Thus, immense communal lavatories were built, consisting of both urinals and water-closets, where the students might accede to their eventual needs. After  Mrs Stanford’s death, a less puritan, rather more realistic administration decided upon the construction of bathrooms within the buildings themselves. While the original lavatories were never torn down - they were part of the University's original patrimony - in 1990, they served principally as a home for the clandestine meetings of homosexuals. This space seemed to us ideal for the staging of our production. Without being too precise about our intended use of it, we obtained permission to set up a research center in one of these bathrooms, which we rather pompously baptized the "Experimental Theater Laboratory". Our goal was not to efface the ignoble functions of the space, but rather to build upon these in order to create a spectacle which would have its origins in negativity. The performance we envisaged would thus be the natural prolongation of the process of defecation. By transgressing the rules of good taste and savoir-vivre, we hoped to return in some paradoxical fashion to the "sacred" roots of theatre. 

I will not burden this introduction with a detailed account of each performance. I will say only that the production was, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating in which I have ever participated.[4] Staged with a minimum of material assets, I would put its artistic accomplishments on a par with those of Marivaux' s La dispute, as staged by Patrice Chéreau in the early 70's. The scenery was conceived by Hamid Arjomand, a set designer of Iranian origin, who had later specialized in industrial design. The small windows of the original space had been covered with wooden panels, on which Hamid had reproduced, in large lettering, some texts of the Marquis de Sade. The walls were entirely covered with writings in red paint. The floor towards the front was strewn with straw. The stage itself was separated into two parts, the space of the prison which was located in  the urinals, and the space of the tableaux, which were staged in the bathroom area, separated from the urinals by a screen which lighting could render transparent when necessary.

The spectators themselves were crowded together, either on the stairs descending into the lavatories, or upon wooden benches which had been set up, or even standing. The echoes of the space amplified the slightest sound. Every word spoken became a howling in favor of Sade. Boards installed on the top of the cabins allowed for a further opening into space. A complex choreography of the bodies, which did not move in the same spatial dimension, conferred a sense of strangeness which Freud associates with the unconscious.[5] The lighting, crude and rudimentary, constantly projected shadows of the actors onto the walls and ceiling. An innovative use of the doors converted the space into a panopticum which evoked a dungeon far better than any realistic set could have done. At the heart of the spectacle, the screen rose up, transforming the space into a unique place where the real and imaginary became inseparable. Erotic tableaux, provocative, abject, sometimes unbearable portrayed the secret sexual practices (piercing, mutilation) of the rebellious youth of the 90's. At the end, they resolved into a sort of pool, the floor of the bathroom having been covered previously with ten inches of water in which the actors moved and splashed and crawled, naked and dirtied. In the last scene, while one could hear over the microphone the voice of the Marquis intoning the wishes of his last will and testament, the actor playing Sade lay inert in the water as if drowned. Hundreds of red carnations tumbled around him, floating on the surface of the water. His wife, also naked, finally covered his corpse with a white sheet, in absolute silence, thus ending the performance.

If many members of the audience were shocked by what they judged to be an obscene and pornographic spectacle, some even leaving the performances abruptly with cries of outrage, others came again and again to see the production. A critic rightly wrote: “Clearly, the students had a hit that could have run for years.[6]” Each night, a long line of spectators waited patiently for several hours to be sure of getting in, as the space could not accomodate more than fifty people at each performance. If the article in the San Jose Mercury News showed it's critic's lack of taste for the avant-garde, the one which ran in the Stanford Daily was more positive, if as confused: “Strange as it may sound, the bathroom is the perfect place for the performance. It's cold, it's uncomfortable and it's weird. and all of these qualities suck the audience right into the Marquis' cell. [...] The message of the play is that society represses not only individual actions, but also tries to control the imagination and thoughts of its members. Imagination is an escape, a city of refuge from the real world, and an important part of the human psyche. In challenging society's standards for art, the play is challenging the idea that there should be standards at all.”[7] Among the reactions of the spectators, I was particularly moved by that of Andrei Siniavsky. A visiting scholar at Stanford, the famous Russian dissident had made a point of seeing the play I had mentioned to him. He attended the performance on May 31st, and sat at my side so that I could comment upon the play. He remained motionless and fascinated throughout the hour the performance lasted. When we left, he told me he was overwhelmed, adding that while in prison, he had had fantasies similar to those he had seen on stage. He asked me for a copy of the text, in the hope that some Russian director might be able to stage the play in a theatre in Moscow.

III

After the lavatory scandal, a final project brought me together with Babak once more, the following year,  working in San Francisco's Mission Theatre on a play entitled Fragments of an America. While the production was staged with better material means than Sade in the Abyss, the text abandoned the radical perspective which we defended, based on the use of filth, human waste and fragmented images. Radical criticism succumbed little by little to ease, romanticism and aesthetic complacencies. I tried, without too much hope, to preserve appearances in the text of the program,[8] but I felt that our collaboration was now coming to an end. A few months later, having embraced religious faith, Babak repented of his former sins. He chose a new thesis advisor, more in keeping with his new faith, and roundly denounced the activities of the "Experimental Laboratory Theatre" as an error of his youth, a diabolical experience (sic) into which I had dragged him against his will. This was to be the last time we spoke. Most definitely, my jig was up. Soon after Babak's declaration of repentance, I was denounced by the leaders of the MLA. In a frenzied article, Professor Naomi Schor depicted me as an evil and reactionary person, a participant in a plot engineered by the extreme right against feminism and the political correctness which now reigned over American campuses.[9] The time of witch-hunts had returned.