Drive-In Setting a Minus for ‘Marat’

One play’s novelty is another’s poison. “Marat/Sade at the Drive-In,” Wolfskill Theater’s drive-in production at the downtown Donald M. Jones Memorial Drive-In Playhouse, gets high points only for the spirit of audacity with which it was undertaken. This is one theatrical experiment that would have been better confined to the laboratory.

The drive-in theater format, which worked so well in Wolfskill’s playful parody “Murder at Mayfield Mall” last season, proves inimical to serious drama--particularly Weiss’ weighty dialectic set in an insane asylum in post-revolutionary France.

Perhaps the play might have succeeded better if it had been radically revamped for the occasion, but directors Michael Shamus Wiles and Paul Mackley present the piece essentially as written. The exception is the new music by Mr. Tamale--a dismal contribution, atonal and dirge-like. With this rudimentary sound system, which sounds as if someone left his AM car radio on, the singers may as well be performing a capella.

Certainly, in his celebrated 1965 staging of this play, Peter Brook radically broached the barrier between audience and performer. Here, having the actors mingle freely among the vehicles, groping one another, goggling madly and washing car windows with their hair, like Mary Magdalenes of the Bowery, is not so much disorienting as it is distracting. Key monologues are lost, and those we do hear are shouted, anachronistically, through microphones.

Viewed from the isolation of a car, this is theater at a distance, misbegotten and flat, a strange hybrid that, in the case of serious drama at least, only detracts from the immediacy of the experience and leaves us longing to gun our engines and lay rubber out of there.

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* “Marat/Sade at the Drive-In,” Donald M. Jones Memorial Drive-In Playhouse, 615 Imperial St., downtown Los Angeles. Saturdays and Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 5. $10 per person plus $10 per car. (213) 620-9229. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.