The fempire strikes back
The Revolutionists
Four French women walk into a dream fugue. Is this the setup for a joke? Perhaps it is — somewhere, sometime — but in The Revolutionists, a play by Lauren Gunderson, it is mainly conceptual. There is no punchline; a bunch of people die at the end. The play is, however, a comedy. The French women — Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Olympe de Gouges, and Marianne Angelle, three historical figures and one composite — meet in what Gunderson calls a “Revolutionary Dream Fugue” in the script. This unreal setting functions like an illusion in which time and space collapse, but in the moment, all makes perfect sense. In the play, everyone is on a first-name basis. The ladies are chatty. They dress in period costume but their banter is as modern as can be.
The Revolutionists continues through Nov. 4 with performances Thursdays through Sundays at the Adobe Rose Theatre. The production is directed by Lindsey Hope Pearlman, one of the founders of Up & Down Theatre Company, a troupe based in Santa Fe and New York that specializes in political satire. The
Revolutionists is set — loosely — in 1793, during the Reign of Terror, a time during the French Revolution when radicals took over the government and were beheading people they suspected of disloyalty. Playwright and feminist Olympe (played by Mary Beth Lindsey) is the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which in 1791 stated that the revolution was falling short when it came to gender equality. Her advocacy was deemed treasonous, and she was executed by guillotine on Nov. 3, 1793. For most of the play, Olympe struggles to write the story of what is happening in France. Is it a play, she wonders, or a story or a speech? She bounces her ideas off Marianne (Danielle Louise Reddick), the composite character whom the playwright describes as a thirtysomething “badass black woman in Paris. She is from the Caribbean, a free woman, a spy working with her husband, Vincent. Tough, classy, vigilant, the sanest one of them all.”
Marianne tries to advise Olympe, but she has little patience for dithering over form and the crafting of killer one-liners when what is most important is to write the story. Otherwise, the victors will always have the upper hand in history — and if Olympe doesn’t write Marianne’s story in particular, then no one will. “She’s there advocating about the rights of women and people of color,” Pearlman said. “I don’t know much about the racial dynamics of the French Revolution, but in more contemporary American history, there is a pattern of women of color activists leading feminist
“The thing that provokes me about the play is, at what point does revolutionary zeal lead to chaos, instability, widespread violence?” — director Lindsey Hope Pearlman
movements and then not necessarily getting the same sort of historical reverence their white counterparts might get. In this historical re-imagining, Marianne is the character that survives.”
The Revolutionists takes on class, race, gender politics, propaganda, and art — and never loses its wit, even when the drama escalates. When Charlotte (Ariana Karp) enters the space of the dream fugue — which might be a prison cell, but could just as reasonably be a drawing room — and starts discussing her plans to assassinate French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, the play turns into a true-crime gabfest in the style of the wildly popular storytelling podcast “My Favorite Murder,” in which a pair of hosts tell each other stories of famous and not-so-famous murders in a conversational manner, using humor as relief from the darkness. “By stabbing?” Olympe asks of Charlotte’s chosen method of violence. “Yeah. Because he’s awful,” Charlotte replies. Charlotte, who was executed in July 1793, arrives on her own as well as by the power of Olympe’s pen — though Olympe doesn’t quite know what to do with this new character who is in search of a writer.
Marie (Maureen McKenna), a truly unexpected guest, has her head firmly affixed to her neck — though her execution, which happened on Oct. 16, 1793, seems to have already taken place (and takes place again later). Marie talks about herself in the third person, among other affectations, such as uttering the word “Sigh,” and then explaining, “Sometimes I say it instead of doing it.” Marie is obscenely wealthy and is just beginning to understand what it means to have lived in a world of privilege. She has her own side of the story — and she really, really likes bows and ribbons. Life, to Marie, is a series of reasons to be amused and delighted.
The importance of writing and of theater is emphasized throughout the play, which Pearlman said appealed to her as an inspiration to keep going with her own work in the face of the current state of contemporary American politics. Gunderson created intelligent women connected to their own ideals and visions, Pearlman said. “The thing that provokes me about the play is, at what point does revolutionary zeal lead to chaos, instability, widespread violence? That’s scary to think about. I certainly consider myself an activist. I’ve participated in marches and protests, and I feel acutely how cancerous certain injustices embedded in our culture can be. But at the same time, I’m not out to assassinate someone for their political beliefs, nor do I want to be assassinated for mine.”
In September, Pearlman took a bus from her home in Brooklyn to Washington, where she was arrested for disrupting the first round of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. She was in the room when Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour stood up and called for the hearing to be adjourned. “Kamala Harris stood up as soon as Chuck Grassley banged the gavel and asked for the hearings to be postponed,” Pearlman said. “Before they stood up, I didn’t know if I would have the courage to disrupt a Senate hearing. It just seemed so outside the normal way I would engage in my own democracy. When they stood up, I felt a very deep sense of sisterhood and women’s activism. At a certain point you can’t be polite about it; you can’t be apologetic. And I think that, right now, women are pissed off in the same way these women of the French Revolution were, airing grievances.”