After a number of smaller productions in Chicago (one-acts by Beckett, Cocteau, Chekhov and an original play, Travelling Light, by Nick Fracaro) and Toronto (Tom Eyen's The White Whore and The Bit Player and Cocteau's The Human Voice in French and English), the next major exploration of the evolving Thieves Theatre aesthetic came in 1984 in Toronto. The production was an adaptation of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade which played at Toronto's Theatre Centre at midnight. The cast included members of a support group for released mental patients with whom Gabriele and Nick began the project in a workshop. Other cast members included a band, several members of the blossoming Toronto punk community and a handful of professional actors. The production polarized the Toronto theatre community. There were rumors of stabbings and mainlining drugs in the performance (both untrue). One letter to an editor stated,

"the spectacle was not a performance. It was a perverse, violent assault on the actors in the play... Someone like Fracaro should be ostracized from the theatre scene."

This drew responses such as,

"Unlike much theatre I have seen, [Marat/Sade] raised questions -- made me think, wonder and feel... Fracaro and the entire cast deserve our congratulations for exploring some of the real avenues of theatre."

(Both letters appeared in December 1984 issues of NOW, a Toronto weekly.) The managers of Theatre Centre supported Thieves Theatre throughout.

With this production, the event went far beyond the walls of the theatre. The non-acting of the mentally ill performers, and the barely submerged violence of the punks unleashed in this forum of supported legitimacy, violated the safe boundaries of what was to be experienced in a theatrical performance. In this Marat/Sade the audience accustomed to theatre was indeed unconvinced of its safety. The punk community, which had never before experienced theatre, found its voice expressed in a public forum. The former patients were regarded as something to be more than pitied, perhaps feared, perhaps respected. The production refused to resolve any of the questions it opened. And it is debatable what the long term effects were on public regard for the patients, the actors or the punks, since ultimately it was impossible to determine who was whom (arguably, the underlying point of the play as written).