The University of Southern California's production of  "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat: As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade"—aka "Marat/Sade"—plunges audiences into the unsettling world of the Charenton Asylum in 1808 France. Within this “play-within-a-play,” the inmates reenact the final days of radical French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, culminating in his assassination by Charlotte Corday in 1793. As the performance unfolds, the lines between history, madness, and ideology begin to blur. The actors—patients of the asylum, many institutionalized for their political beliefs—struggle to separate performance from lived trauma. 

In this thrust-style stage, the set design created an immersive and unsettling environment that drew the audience directly into the bathhouse of the Charenton Asylum. Audience members entered through barred gates—just as the patients did—immediately evoking a sense of confinement and blurring the line between observer and participant. Inspired by the director’s vision of a “hall of mirrors that lines the echo chamber of humanity’s history,” the space behind the audience was lined with worn-down shower walls that mirrored each other, each fitted with shower heads hanging directly above the audience. This placed viewers physically and psychologically within the same space as the patients. At times, the entrance gate was concealed by an Austrian-style curtain, imagined to have been crafted by the inmates themselves from scraps of old clothes, food sacks, and leftover fabric.