A grinning Gargantua in sweat-pants quietly masturbates stage left. One little lady dangles a rope of drool from her lips, and shrieks and snickers. A squat hirsute thing (female) who looks like a drowned foetus whaps her head against the uprights of what used to be the vice-ridden Hotel Touraine's gaudy ballroom.

These are some of the inmates of the asylum at Charenton, a progressive booby-bin that housed sex criminals and lunatics in post-Revolutionary France, and sheltered the Marquis de Sade for the last distracted years of his life. Sade was no more popular with the Comstocks of the Napoleonic era than he had been with the Bourbons' cheka; both regimes jailed him for the same apolitical crimes. But Charenton's enlightened director M. Coulmier encouraged him to write and direct plays for the inmates, and Charenton became a sort of high camp Vauxhall for the Parisian upper crust, who appeared regularly to see the former Marquis' bombastic plays and hysterical associates.

The Theater Company of Boston's interpretation of The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (abbreviated Marat/Sade) owes much to the scheme of those who created it (abbreviate Weiss/Brook). Sired by Brecht, Artaud, Genet and Pirandello, conceived by the German filmmaker and novelist Peter Weiss, translated by Geoffrey Skelton, set to music by R. C. Peaslee, and delivered in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Peter Brook, the play is not one man's play open to interpretation by other men. It is an anthology of the century's predominant dramatic modes, and arrived at the Touraine interpreted and orchestrated, and largely choreographed and staged, by the above corporation.

In gist, Marat/Sade shows Sade's little company reenacting the death of the Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat at the hand of the Royalist Charlotte Corday, before a stage audience of Charenton's director and his lady. But the murder is strung out by the philosophical intrusions of Sade, who leaves his stage-side perch to argue with Marat and deflect the action; by the blank verse narration of the herald, who prompts, cajoles and apologizes; by the petulant interruptions of M. Courmier, upset by the political content of the skit; and by the eruptions of the mental patients, who are paradoxically part of, and apart from, the aggressive "message" of the play. Everyone agrees that things were pretty bad before the Revolution, but Sade uses a cast of the permanently and prototypically downtrodden to illustrate his point that the poor will always be poor, the wretched always wretched and deceived by their leaders. Marat is killed as an act of ritual murder (primitive societies sacrifice their great man) and as an act of political punishment (his integrity is in question, his hubris at fault). But Marat/Sade is a play without plot (for the slaying could be done in a trice) and without characters (who are all insane and presumably characterless, obsession taking the place of personality). It is a protracted spectacle.

And the play's success depends on the rhythm and fluidity of the action it presents. Brook's production never lagged, but kept things moving almost frenetically by means of sudden racket from the periphery, the rhythmic scurrying of the patients, mime, song, dance, a plentiful use of props, masks, and brilliant physical gadgetry -- and above all, a sheer sense of pace that never allowed either the leads or the audience to breathe or reflect. David Wheeler's Boston version inherits most of Weiss/Brook's inspiration and contributes a little of its own. The play "breathes." Marat (Clinton Kimbrough) hunkers in a large bathtub at the center, periodically approached by Corday (Lisa Richards) and Sade (Frederick Kimball). The patients sprawl, wander and sprint across the stage in johnnies and slippers. And a chorus in the tatters of Revolutionary costumes roams from the lights to the wings, now clustering around the tub to mime the principals' conversation, now reaching out to incite the patients to riot. Each brawl is quelled by the nurses, and our attention returns to the tendentious rhetoric of Sade and Marat, or to the visits of a sleepy, melancholy Charlotte to the archon's tubside.

The excitement is relentless. Jacques Roux (Robert Fields), the mad priest of the insurrection, bursts in straitjacketed and has to be crushed. Deperret (Joseph Hindy), an "erotomaniac" whom Brook equipped with a perpetual erection, urges Charlotte to return to Caen; he forgets himself and nearly rapes her. Sade is whipped -- in London and New York with Corday's flowing hair, since the decency laws forbade public flagellation -- and here with a lash of six flat leather tails. Marat sinks into darkness and confronts the ghosts of his past, who slander his childhood, and Voltaire and Lavoisier, who mock his scientific achievements -- all played by a writhing tableau of mental patients.

David Wheeler's production departs from Brook where it shouldn't and follows it where it must. This is inevitable, since the play really doesn't exist apart from its interpretation. Wheeler substitutes a broad cineramic "happening" stage for Brook's deep proscenium, paralyzing the underlings and thrusting the chorus in our laps. This is fine, for he makes good use of vertical poses (pyramids, piggy-backs, tableaux) at the expense of marching scenes and horas. But there are other problems. Kimball and Kimbrough, while excellent, are all too evidently acting toward their roles from their personalities (which shouldn't exist); the result is a lag in the first act that is enhanced by the lengthy argument between Sade and Marat. This is fairly tedious, since the play doesn't want to give ideas, but only imitations of ideas, swathed in anger and spectacle. The debate is something a callous director could cut down, a careless director here takes seriously and a really alert one would accelerate; it should go by like a shot. And the pacing falls off sometimes, perhaps by accident -- the murder itself should his us like an orgasm, but doesn't.

But Marat/Sade is so intrinsically exciting, and TCB's acting so good, that the play is exhaustingly effective. John Coe (Herald), Frank Cassidy (Coulmier) and Bronia Stefan (Marat's mistress Simonne) deserve mention. Roberta Collinge and Josephine Lane highlight the chorus, and the full-throated Katherine Garnett (who drools) very nearly takes the show. Go, if you think you can Brook it. But hope David Wheeler tightens up Act I by tonight, when I'm going again.