Emotionless cruelty, indulgent general copulation, imagery of limbs being hacked off … don’t worry, you have not been conned into spending $9 on “Sin City” again (its vacuous violence and celebration of the Abu Ghraib mentality is ample reason for less than one viewing). Rather, these extreme antics are from “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” or “Marat/Sade,” a piece of entertainment also once charged with existing for its shock value. “Marat/Sade” is now playing through May 21 at UCSD’s new Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre.

But unlike the rather dim strategies of hip Hollywood director Robert Rodriguez, the governing philosophy behind Peter Weiss’ play is to use the shock value for a purpose. “Marat/Sade” works under the principles of the Theater of Cruelty, which asserts that theater should not concern itself with imparting meaning through words, but rather through violent physicality and jolting sound, in order to bring the audience out of the desensitization of being spectators, showing ugliness and pain in order to cajole the viewers into unleashing the subconscious to ponder larger realities. “Marat/Sade,” a tough show given surprisingly to the undergraduates for a spring production, presents to us two hours of well-crafted theater that continuously disturbs the mind and senses with impassioned inmate mobbing, intelligent political speeches, jarring sound design and eerily demented, cartoonish musical numbers.

There are a number of very mature performances that arise from this undergad show, no doubt strongly influenced by the visiting LA.-based director Stefan Novinski, who had the cast prepare for an entire quarter before rehearsal even started in the spring. It is no easy task to play realistic mental patients, let alone mental patients who are pretending to play characters in another play within this play, all the while acting in a style that does not emphasize the traditional aspects of theater. As the inmates perform the Marquis de Sade’s play about Jean-Paul Marat and his influence on France’s Reign of Terror, the cast alternates between luring in the audience to their convincing performance of inmates and baiting us with their convincing performance of characters from the French Revolution, purposely leaving us feeling ill-at-ease.

Analeis Lorig, who plays Charlotte Corday, does a fine job of blurring the lines between Corday and the narcoleptic patient; her singing voice, left unrefined, functions poignantly in context as it wavers over the set, telling us to forget about the words and listen more to the raw human voice. A surprisingly delightful performance from Bryan Charles Swarberg as the Herald brings a very robust dose of humor, as he effectively delivers his intermittent screwball metered rhymes, giving bits of droll pleasure. Steven Lone does a perceptively excellent job of delivering Jean-Paul Marat’s complex political speeches while maintaining a palpable suffering from both the painful skin disease that keeps him in a bathtub and the nihilistic ideological challenges of the Marquis de Sade. Gregory Malcolm Moore tackles the Marquis de Sade, the historical figure from which the word “sadism” was coined, with confident authority — culminating in the vivid rendering of the scene where de Sade asks Corday to whip him as he delivers an immense soliloquy.

Surrounding the cast is the exquisite lighting of Jeff Fightmaster and inspired set of Melpomene Katakalos, both graduate designers who no doubt must have been eager to work in the new Potiker space. The aesthetics of the ugliness of decay, insanity and poverty are reproduced so artfully that it almost becomes too beautiful. Perhaps Weiss’ vision would have been truer in a more claustrophobic space like Galbraith Hall 157, where the audience wouldn’t have the distance to admire the stage like a painting, but nonetheless, one can hardly relinquish the striking effect the designs have in the new space.

There are many things at work in this production of “Marat/Sade” and not least is the very essence of Weiss’ play, which is the battling ideologies of pessimism, nihilism and futility of resistance offered by the marquis against the impassioned demands for social reform, agitation and revolution from Marat. With the high quality of this undergraduate production, and the ever timely themes that are conjured in the play’s historic style, “Marat/Sade” is a necessary viewing for everyone who can scrounge up $10 for a ticket.