Doug Wright, 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his play I AM MY OWN WIFE has earned a reputation for dramatizing subversive, extravagant, and controversial characters from history. Writing with dark humor, Wright examines the nature and price of freedom through the final days of one of France’s most infamous and scandalous figures.

Imprisoned in France’s Charenton Asylum at the turn of the 18th century is the Marquis de Sade. In defiance of the increasingly punitive censorship that deprives him of quill, ink, and even clothes, he writes with anything and everything available to him in his cell: an obsession that swings between madness and a heroic refusal to be silenced. Last seen as Vladimir in New Rep’s award-winning production of WAITING FOR GODOT, stage and screen star Austin Pendleton returns to play de Sade, who embraces freedom of expression while affirming to us that all freedoms have a price.

Photo: Austin Pendleton. Photo by Richard Feldman