Not sure.

The official version is: This is a French asylum. An insane asylum.

Some of us gathered here in the New Theater on Chapel Street came in as “the audience.” We came to watch a play staged by the Yale School of Drama, running through Jan. 27, called Marat/Sade. (Details here.) It’s an updating of a play by Peter Weiss about, well, another play, supposedly written by the Marquis de Sade and performed in 1808 by insane asylum inmates. It concerns the pending assassination of revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in 1793 — and the debate between Marat and Sade about whether to continue to believe in revolution. The play has been updated, with lots of music added, and general mayhem.

Walking into the theater is a disorienting experience, on purpose. The space has been redesigned as the interior of the asylum. Some of the “audience members” sit on the floor alongside “actors.” Characters start “cleaning up” and interacting with patrons before the play’s beginning. Most of the audience sits on risers; behind us are rifle-bearing guards. The point: We’re all inside the asylum together. Our roles are blurred. So’s the line between idealism and cynicism, between guards and inmates, between the insane and the idealistic.

“We hope to leave you disturbed,” director Nelson T. Eusebio III has written in the playbill. It’s working already. The play starts; the lights remain on. In case we don’t make it out of here, in case we get locked up first, or just lose our minds, maybe it’s a good idea just to jot down some notes. For the record.

• * * * *

The basic themes are pretty apparent pretty fast. Are we all inmates? Is revolution crazy? Or are revolutionaries crazy? Do crazy people make revolutions? Or do revolutions make people crazy?

Marat (Joseph Parks, shown with Jamel Rodriguez as de Sade) is clearly going crazy. He spends the play inside a bathtub, writing one more piece to inspire the masses.

He struggles to see the paper amid the smoke of burning corpses outside, the detritus of a revolution that everyone, except Marat, recognizes has gone unspeakably wrong.

Marat looks familiar in that bathtub. Where have I seen him before?

Oh yeah. In an art history class almost 30 years ago. That didn’t feel like an asylum, exactly.

We know Marat will be bludgeoned to death by the end of the evening. Suspense: Will he completely lose it first?

Will we?

* * * *

“We should all carry weapons these days…”

* * * *

The Marquis de Sade is taunting Marat for his continued faith. “For you as for me,” he says, “only the most extreme actions matter.” De Sade (the father of sadism) orchestrates all the singing and dancing and miming and panting of the twisted characters around him, taking sexual liberties with man and woman alike. A rock band is playing in the background.

Where have I seen this before?

Oh yeah. That’s where. The audience was part of the asylum in Rocky Horror, too. Only here, Dr. Frank N. Furter loses his charm as the Marquis de Sade. Again, that’s on purpose. The menacing, the “disturbing,” overwhelms the titillating.

Is de Sade’s hopeless sadism merely a new variant from the sadism of the revolution? Or does the new form embody more idealism, more hope, than he’s willing to acknowledge?

* * * *

A priest in a straitjacket dreams that churches be converted into schools. Then, finally, something “useful” can be taught in the schools. The nurses haul him away, of course.

When is the “script” being followed? Coulmier (Nicholas Carrere), the hospital director, orders lines taken out; the guards or nurses interrupt scenes that get “out of hand.”

* * * *

Marat: “I do not know if I am hangman or victim… Everything fills me with horror.”

De Sade: “For me the only reality is my imagination. The revolution no longer interests me.”

* * * *

“Long live watery broth!”

“Long live the revolution!”

* * * *

The inmates are climbing a stepladder. One by one they act out being guillotined. Then their “lifeless” bodies flop down onto mattresses. They make beheading look like fun. Is that what revolutions do?

* * * *

Any updating of a play requires searching for its modern context with which to challenge us. (Well, some work better than others.) It’s easy to find the modern parallels here: the asylum director spells them out. He speaks in — guess what? — a Southern accent curiously like that of a current American president. And like that president he suppresses freedom in the name of waging a war.

Yes, that might be heavy-handed. But in a funny way, it actually offers hope here. Indeed, the director writes in his notes he found hope for the “Theatre of the Absurd” of our current politics in the pages of this old play. We find it now in the contest between the director and De Sade over what scenes will be performed, what lines will be uttered. There’s no clear winner, it seems. That has to do for hope these days.

We’ll take it.

The director is clapping down on the floor of the asylum. But the “audience members” aren’t.

I thought this play was over. How will we know when it has ended? Will it end?

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