“Cripes, I gotta write this blurb about a Bulgarian choir and some singer named Lisa something. Ever heard of her?”
“Lisa Gerrard? The Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated soundtrack composer and singer who wrote all that amazing, experimental music based on medieval chants and global rhythms with Dead Can Dance?”
“Yeah! Dead Can Dance! They were a goth band! That’s it… 80s goth rock star. Done.”
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Seen it.
Saw it during a friend’s ‘Movie Night’, where he would dig up obscurities and try to re-program the kind of people that heckle ‘Mythbusters’. There were [counting] five of us, I think, so you make the sixth person who I’ve ever run across who’s heard of that movie.
Edit: Movie, play, whatever…anything by that name.
Oh. Oh no. This must be seen in play format… it’s literally 360 happening all around you. You get up and move through “the asylum” through the performance, and interact with the inmates. The screen cannot capture it. At least, not without serious virtual reality stuff. See the play. 
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Ummm, that’s going to definitely depend on the production. They’re not all staged that way.
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You’re not wrong, but when they go for the original staging notes they go for them.
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What original staging notes are you referring to? I only know the play in English translation, so I don’t know the genuine original, but I just consulted the 1965 printing and I can’t find anything that states that the performance takes place in and amongst the audience. From the character list’s description of the Patients/extras:
Their presence must set the atmosphere behind the acting area.
Behind the acting area seems like upstage to me.
I can’t find a copy online to consult, but in addition, I don’t recall Susan Sontag mentioning anything about the actors mingling with the audience in her writings about the original New York production in Against Interpretation. I distinctly recall her writing about the staging of the conclusion, in which a riot takes place until, at a signal from the mental home’s director, the cast stops, as one turns towards the audience, and offers the audience a sustained menacing slow handclap. As she described it, this was clearly a staging which involved the cast facing the audience from the stage. (Admittedly, these stage directions are also not present in the first English printing of the play.)
Going off of memories of things read decades ago, but the immersive production I saw in Palo Alto (or Stanford?) impressed me enough to look for opportunities to read about the play elsewhere, and some of what I read gave me to believe that this was in line with the play as written, and with productions of it.
Nonetheless, I would recommend over a film production.
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Well, maybe, but it doesn’t seem like it to me. Now, theatrical happenings were just beginning to get off the ground around the time of Marat/Sade’s premiere (or shortly thereafter), and the immersive approach does seem like a natural fit for the material, so I’d easily buy that what you described could have been an early (if not original) staging.
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