Rebels who don’t lose their heads
You’ll hear a lot about the power of art and storytelling, the importance of sisterhood and the push toward political resistance in “The Revolutionists.” But it’s mostly just abstract, circular cant.
Especially toward the end of Lauren Gunderson’s play, set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, you’ll hear the word “story” so often that you’ll wish everyone would stop talking about it so you could actually see one unfold.
There is a narrative of
sorts in Town Hall Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere, which opened Saturday, Sept. 29. Olympe de Gouges (Sarah Mitchell), a “lady playwright” and a real-life author during the French Revolution, has writer’s block even as guillotines are chopping heads off outside her airy garret.
Liliana Duque Piñeiro’s white and gray set design creates the feel of a make-believe writer’s playland cloistered high above the luridness of the real world (corals and reds glare in from outside, courtesy of Keira Sullivan’s lighting design), and that’s exactly how Olympe relates to her surroundings. She knows that the executions and riots outside ought to fuel her creative juices, and that a timely play would be the perfect career move right now, but all she can do is flit among vague ideas — be “wise and witty” or “annoyingly prescient” or “solemn, bracing” — as if the Revolution were only as real to her as a fantasyland or a historical period.
To her aid come two other actual French Revolution figures — Charlotte Corday (Heather Kellogg) and Marie Antoinette (Suzie Shepard) — as well as one of Gunderson’s invention in Marianne Angelle (Kimberly Ridgeway), a Caribbean revolutionary fighting France’s colonization and slavery.
Gunderson subtitles her play a “revolutionary dream fugue” in addition to a “comedy” and a “true story,” which is probably supposed to help explain how all these women could wind up in the same attic, asking the wordsmith Olympe for her help with Corday’s last words, Marianne’s political pamphlets and better PR for Marie Antoinette. But the direction, by Susan E. Evans, leaves unclear just how real or how inside Olympe’s head the world of the play is supposed to be, which saps the show of its forward momentum. If Marie Antoinette can sweep into this humble loft all of a sudden, all enormous wig and ribbons, why couldn’t space aliens or puppets or time travelers? The script is inventive, but its inventiveness is arbitrary, like a clever, wideranging brainstorming session that hasn’t yet been hammered into a story line.
Although all three side characters serve mostly as playthings for Olympe, that relationship is especially troubling in the case of Marianne. The effort to make “The Revolutionists” a play not just about white women is laudable, but only Marianne being fictional fits in with a long tradition by which white writers generalize or make believe about characters of color in a way that they never would for white characters.
The way Marianne helps redeem Olympe also adheres gratingly to stereotype; Marianne is an unfailingly righteous revolutionary, with some sassy remarks thrown in, whose virtue exists that Olympe might discover hers. When Marianne gives a mike-dropping speech contrasting writer’s block with “being ripped from your country, stuffed in the belly of a ship, carted across the world and forced to break your back to make sugar for French pastries,” Olympe only responds, “Oh my God, I can write about you!” We’re meant to laugh at her shortsightedness and selfishness, but it’s incongruous and convenient the way Marianne — who wears a sash that says “Revolution for all!” — launches into the subject only to get a laugh and then drop it.
Her costume might proclaim revolution for all, but her characterization and dialogue say otherwise. In “The Revolutionists,” some sisters are more equal than others.