“Quills” explores the Marquis de Sade’s stay in an asylum.

Artistic censorship, despite the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech, has long been part of the ideological tug of war in the United States. Performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes — also known as the “NEA Four” — faced down that truth in 1990 when National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer vetoed their recommended grants after a roiling backlash against allegedly offensive art. The four filed suit and won, receiving the money from their withheld grants, but the debate over “decency” and government funding for the arts continues to be incendiary.

So consider this: What if the artist in question had been the infamous Marquis de Sade, whose sexually violent literary output landed him in jail or asylums for 32 of his 74 years? Does the argument for freedom of expression grow murkier?

Playwright Doug Wright wrote “Quills” in 1995, in part as a response to the travails of the NEA Four and the ongoing drama surrounding arts content and funding. The now-shuttered Florida Stage was the first South Florida company to produce the Obie Awardwinning play, winning five 1999 Carbonell Awards (including best play) for its production, and the drama was made into a 2000 movie starring Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet.

Now, Infinite Abyss in Wilton Manors is taking on Wright’s bold mixture of fact and fantasy. Set in the Charenton Asylum in the early 19th century, “Quills” pits the seductively manipulative Marquis de Sade (Dominick J. Daniel) against the cleric and the doctor who run the place. The Abbé de Coulmier (Christian Cooper) allows the Marquis comfortable quarters and the privilege of art therapy through painting and writing. Dr. RoyerCollard (Greg Ward), who has hired architect Monsieur Prouix to redo a McMansion in hopes of halting the continued infidelities of the doc’s lusty young wife (Kelly Johnson), advocates restraints, violent punishment and the like.

The doctor finds an unlikely source of funding for the chateau redo in the Marquis’ humiliated and shunned wife, RenéePélagie (Siobhan Nolan). She has come to RoyerCollard to complain that her husband is still somehow publishing his controversial work from behind Charenton’s walls.

The mystery of just how the Marquis is getting his shocking literature out is solved when he passes pages to the young laundress Madeleine LeClerc (Constance Moreau).

The Abbé begins stripping the Marquis of his privileges. First to go are the quill pens, ink and paper he needs to get his incessant fantasies out into the world. Yet where there’s an obsessive will, there’s a way, and the Marquis soon employs wine, bodily fluids, his sheets and his clothing to keep up his literary output.

Staged by artistic director Erynn Dalton, Infinite Abyss’ “Quills” is bawdy, provocative, violent and deliberately discomfiting. Daniel, whose performance as the corrupting sensualist is the company’s strongest, spends approximately half the play stark naked.

Cooper’s Abbé should be the Marquis’ compelling opposite, but the actor doesn’t deliver the rich complexity the role requires. Ward is straightforward as the scheming doctor.

CHRIS BARE/COURTESY Dominick J. Daniel plays the manipulative Marquis de Sade in Infinite Abyss’ production of “Quills.”