Just as an individual, subjected to certain inner pressures beyond his endurance, will suddenly go mad and destroy himself or those around him, so too, apparently, can a segment of society take leave of its senses and deliver itself to the forces of destruction.

—Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror

These words written about the French Reign of Terror are scarily apt for America today. Perhaps that’s one reason why my yet-unproduced play The Mad Scene is getting quite a few readers these days. You can download the entire play here.

Described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror,” The Mad Scene tells a story of collective and individual insanity. As the Terror rages around her, the wax sculptor Marie Grosholtz (the future Madame Tussaud) uses the guillotined heads to shape her creations. Small wonder that she goes insane and holds conversations with wax figures of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Maximilien Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat.

As ICE agents round up and deport alleged gang members to a Salvadoran mega-prison based on no sounder evidence than tattoos, and as foreign students with legal visas are detained and deported for exercising their freedom of speech, and as an American President wreaks lawless revenge upon his enemies, all with the sanction of far too many Americans, I’m reminded of the massacres of September 2-7, 1792, when Parisian mobs emptied the prisons of political prisoners and slaughtered them in staggering numbers.

In my play, the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat harangues the mob:

Fools! The enemy is already here within our gates. Our prisons are full to bursting with aristocrats, priests, traitors, and conspirators, all of them lusting for revenge against every last Parisian who ever dreamed of liberty. And while you go out playing at soldiers fighting foreign enemies, they shall break out of their cells and slaughter your wives, mothers, sisters, and children.

Empty the prisons, kill every last enemy of freedom!

Kill them all before they destroy everything and everyone you love!

Vive la Nation!

Vive la République!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

The September Massacres took the lives of some 1200 people, including priests, monks, and nuns—a small number compared to the victims of the Reign of Terror yet to come.

As Madame Roland said before she was beheaded on November 8, 1793 …

Oh, Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!

—Wim