Penned Up for Use of a Pen

In his astonishingly smart play “Quills,” Doug Wright evokes the fictionalized, extremely gory final days of the imprisoned Marquis de Sade. Wright employs the gross hyperbole of De Sade himself to take us on a harrowing tour, a look at the extremities underlying our more superficial day-to-day debates about free speech. In these days, when presidential candidates decry the perversity of movies they haven’t seen, “Quills” examines the far-reaching consequences of censorship that seem to elude the movie reviewer in Bob Dole.

“Quills” is that rare play that is grotesque only out of necessity for its themes, a play that is at once very funny and profoundly disturbing. Imagine a Grand Guignol dressed up as a Restoration comedy, held together by beautiful writing and a passionate idea. Clearly the playwright stands for free speech, but he has no interest in easy arguments. Wright insists that the cost of free speech can be frightening, but the playwright shows that the cost of censorship is even more horrifying, and in unexpected ways.

However, it will take work on the part of the theatergoer to find all these qualities in the production that opened Wednesday night at the Geffen Playhouse. Director Adrian Hall fails to establish the play’s deadly serious underpinnings. In crucial roles, he has not elicited the performances needed to plunge us into the mordent comic intensity of “Quills” and keep us there.

The marquis is being kept in the Charenton Asylum in France, 1807. There he scribbles his mad, erotic, violent, somehow riveting stories; this is his only pleasure. He smuggles his stories out, his only communication with the world at large. For her own social-climbing reasons, the marquis’ wife bribes the asylum head Dr. Royer-Collard (Robert Dorfman) into silencing De Sade. Claiming a more pious motivation for the silencing, the doctor gives the task of censorship to the gentle Abbe de Coulmier (Martin Rayner).

The marquis understands how threatening he is to the so-called moral order. In arguing his aesthetic with the at-first sympathetic abbe, De Sade claims his writing keeps him from going insane. In the traditional counter-argument, the abbe says he believes De Sade’s pornographic stories only exacerbate his insanity. The marquis asks a question that the abbe has clearly, and fatally, not thought through: “Are your convictions so feeble that mine cannot stand in opposition to them?”

The more restrictive the measures taken against De Sade, the more creative the marquis becomes in finding ways to write. This battle escalates into a horrific act of violence, until the final, even more horrific silencing of the marquis, in which he is systematically stripped of any and all possible quills.

The production’s problems start with Howard Hesseman’s Marquis de Sade. Hesseman does get one thing right--his character’s mischievousness. His is an avuncular marquis; he giggles, he makes adorable faces along with the most unholy suggestions. Hesseman does deliver the sheer energy of his character, establishing that the marquis is not a vile criminal but an irrepressible satirist.

He does not, however, suggest a man of passionate ideas or a man whose strong convictions are actually dangerous. In “Quills,” the marquis is not simply a storyteller who cannot be silenced--he is the Other, the perverse voice inside ourselves that frightens us, that frightens the censors. He is the reason why censors exist.

At Wednesday’s opening, Hesseman appeared under-rehearsed and not fully inhabiting his character. He substituted bellowing for real passion, and in the stretches of the play that he spends nude, his awkwardness seemed to underline his own discomfort, not the character’s. Orchestrated by Hesseman, the tour-de-force scene that ends Act 1 was grating, where it should have been devastating and truly scary.

Tone problems begin at the beginning. As the Doctor, Dorfman starts as an unhinged man given to tics and borscht-belt eye-popping. Although he is definitely funny, Dorfman is so burlesque that it’s difficult to take him seriously when he gets vicious. As Madeleine, the young laundress who is De Sade’s fan and friend, Robin Terry overdoes the girl’s sweetness and light; she appears to be playing Wendy in “Peter Pan.”

Not everyone returned on opening night for the second act, which was the stronger half of the evening. This act centers on the story’s real protagonist, the Abbe de Coulmier, the character who is truly destroyed by the play’s events because he does not understand his own motivation in them. The beatific-looking Rayner undergoes a riveting transformation, which may be hard to see because he’s swimming against the current here. Margo Skinner is also good as De Sade’s wife.

Set designer Barry Robison extends the bare brick and wooden slats of the asylum out into the auditorium, where the setting’s ruin is also represented by chandeliers covered with ragged strips of gauze. Unfortunately it takes more than a semi-environmental set to ensnare an audience in a playwright’s vision. The Geffen Playhouse has shown courage in opening this, its first full season, with a play as potentially alienating to viewers as “Quills.” One detects a subsequent lack of courage, though, has marred the execution of that brave act.

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“Quills,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood, Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 3. $32.50-$37.50. (310) 208-5454. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Robert Dorfman: Doctor Royer-Collard

Paul Anthony Stewart: Monsieur Prouix

Margo Skinner: Renee Pelagie

Martin Rayner: Abbe de Coulmier

Howard Hesseman: The Marquis

Robin Terry: Madeleine Leclerc

David Permenter: A Lunatic

Colette Kilroy: Madame Royer-Collard

With: Javier Armijo, Robert Baker, Antonia Bath, Kirsten Beyer, Jeremy Lee, CB Smith .

A Geffen Playhouse production. By Doug Wright. Directed by Adrian Hall. Sets Barry Robison. Costumes Melina Root. Lights Peter Maradudin . Music Richard Cumming. Hair and makeup Elena Breckenridge. Production stage manager Jill Johnson Gold.