Cal Rep’s Quills powerfully articulates the destructiveness of censorship on the artist

Cory Bilicko
Culture Writer

It’s a rarity the play that can articulate its moral with such power and vigor that the audience is left unquestioningly convinced of what the playwright is trying to convey.
For me, Doug Wright’s Quills is such a play.
Wright wrote Quills in the 1990s as a reactionary piece against conservative resistance to the arts of that time, particularly the high-profile case of the “NEA Four” — four performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were recalled because of the controversial nature of their works. Although the artists eventually won their case in court in 1993 and were granted the money for which they had initially been approved, the incident opened up the debate about the fine line between obscenity and art.
Wright took some historical liberties with Quills, in which Doctor Royer-Collard, who runs Charenton Asylum, is paid a visit by Renee Pelagie, wife of the institution’s most notorious occupant— the Marquis de Sade. She offers the doctor money to prevent her husband from writing, since his penchant for penning sadomasochistic pornography has brought disgrace to her name and kept her out of upper-class social circles.

The doctor has the asylum’s French Catholic priest, the Abbe de Coulmier, who is initially sympathetic to the Marquis, confiscate his quills and writing paper, yet the inmate’s stories somehow still manage to be circulated. When Coulmier discovers that Madeleine, a young seamstress who works there, has been smuggling the Marquis’s stories out of his cell, the priest bans her from seeing the writer, who then composes his lascivious tales on his bedclothes in wine, blood and other excrement.
Furious at the Marquis de Sade’s resourcefulness and willfulness, Coulmier strips the author of all his clothing and his chamber of all décor. Still, the resilient Marquis devises another plan to get his stories to the public, and his determination to have a creative outlet reveals itself to be a necessity, rather than simply an act of defiance. The increasingly desperate and furious Coulmier is driven to extreme and gruesome acts in order to silence the Marquis, beginning with the removal of his hands, which proves to be no obstacle to the determined artist. Thus, the battle of wills continues until the Marquis is ultimately stripped of all faculties, physically and intellectually. Or is he?
In California Repertory’s current production of Quills, the commanding Jerry Prell endows the character of the Marquis de Sade with gusto, milking every salacious line he’s given. In the hands (and, eventually, fully nude body) of Prell, what at first seems like a humorous, almost playfully effete antihero is gradually disrobed and exposed as an artist who can certainly endure the inconvenience of being naked, but not the tragedy of being forbidden his art form. Although the Marquis’s determination to find ways to continue writing, even in the most perverse of circumstances, is at first­ darkly comical, the fact that he will not ever give up is testament to the power of creation.
Driving the story is the discourse between the Marquis and Coulmier, here played by Robert Prior, whose gradual transformation from being the Marquis’s compassionate guardian to his ultimate censorial persecutor is convincingly disturbing. Prior proves to be a wise casting choice as the man who clandestinely relishes the very pornography he publicly bans.
Their debate throughout the play is one that is not conveniently one-sided to promote the anti-censorship message, but rather a well-conceived give-and-take that had me, a free-speech advocate and liberal-minded artist, intrigued and engaged.
Remarkably, Cal Rep is proving itself to be a company that knows how to readjust and make the most of its environment (after being displaced in the last few years from The Edison Theatre and then the Long Beach National Guard Armory), as this production makes good use of the “guts” of the Queen Mary, with her exposed industrial parts providing the sensation of being walled-in at an asylum.
The Queen Mary’s Royal Theatre will serve as the Charenton Asylum for Cal Rep’s production of Quills Wednesday to Saturday through March 3 and Tuesday to Saturday from March 6 to March 10. All performances are at 8pm. Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 for students, military and seniors (55 and older). Parking at the Queen Mary is $8 for patrons of Cal Rep performances and $6 for CSULB students and patrons who have dinner aboard the ship. For tickets and more information, call (562) 985-5526 or visit calrep.org.