Review: MARIE ANTOINETTE is a Fresh and Imaginative Look at History

Everyone knows what happened to Marie Antoinette... Spoiler Alert: It's not pretty. It also makes intriguing theatre in David Adjmi's MARIE ANTOINETTE, which presents the doomed French queen filtered through the lens of the spoiled entitled rich girl, much like a Nicole Ritchie or a Paris Hilton. His Marie speaks in modern slang... and is pretty foul mouthed as well. Adjmi tells the story of Marie's fall year by year, concluding with her execution. While the script is remarkably faithful to the facts, it takes wild liberties with everything else.

Adjmi seems to be examining power and how the impulse for power is born. People who don't know who they are look for someone to tell them. I had the impression that Adjmi's intent was to humanize Marie, making her more relatable to a modern audience by portraying her as more the product of her time and station, rather than just as the victim of her miscalculations or shortcomings. However, what the audience is given is a protagonist who doesn't particularly cry out for sympathy or identification, even though she is clearly in over her high wigged head. This changes as Marie is stripped bare of everything both literally and physically... and the production strips itself bare as well in the process. By the end we are presented with a woman whose impending death conveys a depth of character beyond anything you would have expected.

Director Rosalind Faires has done an excellent job staging this piece, keeping the pace sprightly and the action snappy. Adjmi definitely has a way with words resulting in plenty of laughs, starting when the royalty swears like sailors or tries to discover what, if anything, windmills actually do. The conceit gives a great deal of freedom to costume designer Talena Martinez to make an impact, and she delivers a smartly minimalist/modernist take on 18th century French high fashion. The set design by Leslie Turner is both simple and complex. Of particular note is the large apparatus that continuously runs a bolt of fabric from upstage to the audience's feet. This constantly morphing fabric piece starts out bright, colorful and ornately decorated and by the end has been stripped of color and pattern and resembles bars. Patrick Anthony's lighting does a marvelous job of setting time, place and mood throughout the performance.

Actress Indigo Real does an admirable job injecting humanity into Marie. We see Marie grow from a foam-dome who is concerned only with fashion and husband Louis XVI's sexual dysfunction, into a woman with some profound insights. She ultimately makes you care about a character that starts out as frankly repellant.

Uyen-Anh Dang is delightful as Polignac delivering as much with her facial expressions as she does with her flawlessly timed lines. Nicholas Mills is both hilarious and touching as Louis XVI, a clueless, clock obsessed king completely out of his depth politically and domestically. Also worth note is the sublimely surreal performance of Matt Frazier as a talking sheep that speaks only when Marie's alone with him, and seemingly represents a combination of zeitgeist and subconscious. Most of the rest of the cast plays multiple parts, and they all acquit themselves well.

MARIE ANTOINETTE is not a dry, historical piece. Instead, it is a fresh, imaginative look at one of history's more intriguing characters that is worth seeing.

MARIE ANTOINETTE by David Adjmi

Running Time: 90 Minutes with no intermission.

MARIE ANTOINETTE, produced by Capital T Theatre at The Off Center (2211 Hidalgo Street, Austin, TX)

March 03 - March 20, 2016

Thursdays - Sundays 8:00 p.m.

Tickets - $15-$30 Sliding Scale Pay-What-You-Can-Afford

Reservations: www.capitalT.org or 512-537-CAPT

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