Theater Review: Marie Antoinette at The Gamm

Theater Review: Marie Antoinette at The Gamm

Marie Antoinette never had a chance. As she declares of herself in the eponymous play by David Adjmi, now running at the Gamm Theatre, “I was built to be this thing, and now they are killing me for it.” Under the direction of Rachel Walshe, the Gamm’s interpretation of what Marie Antoinette was, and why the mobs howled for her death, makes for an uneven, sometimes frustrating, spectacle of excess and ignorance. But at the conclusion of this deeply problematic production there’s also a powerful depiction of an all-too-human courage that, for at least some theatergoers, will make getting to it worth the wait.

A Flawed Text

To be clear, part of the difficulty here is the play itself. A number of Adjmi’s works are rightly celebrated for their blending of screwball humor and searing tragedy, and that precarious, provocative combination certainly runs through much of Marie Antoinette. But other elements of this play are flawed to varying degrees. It’s possible to debate the effects of inserting contemporary idioms into the dialogue of characters otherwise set firmly in the late-18th Century, but I find the choice distracting and without added value. What light is shed on Marie by having her spit out “ohmigod” in tetchy disgust or scatter F-bombs to express her fear and rage? And would we really otherwise not think of how loudly Marie’s status as entrapped spectacle resonates in this Age of Kardashian? 

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

A much more serious defect lies in the narrative structure. This is a short play, with the Gamm’s production running at slightly less than 90 minutes. But a number of its themes, particularly as Marie slides closer to her grisly fate, are repeated over and over with little apparent development or variation. How many times, for example, does Marie have to beg to be “educated” or shrilly announce her illiteracy before we see it’s a metaphor for her inability to understand herself as well as the forces that have raised her up and that will soon cut her down?  

Questionable Directing Choices

Compounding the problems of the play are some of the choices Walshe makes as director. To go by her playbill essay, she has a complex, impressively nuanced approach to Marie Antoinette as a historical personage and a sure grasp of the cultural and philosophical questions embedded in Adjmi’s text. But that range and depth of understanding doesn’t translate to a wholly effective production. 

For one thing, there’s something off in the pacing of the play’s first half. I don’t mean the moments when conversation between Marie (Madeleine Lambert) and her supposed friends Yolande De Polignac (Casey Seymour Kim) and Therese De Lamballe (Amanda Ruggiero) lapses into long silences curdled by Marie’s boredom and anxiety. That works very well. Instead, often when Marie speaks with her spouse Louis XVI (Jed Hancock Brainerd) or her closest equivalent of a true friend Axel Fersen (Tony Estrella), the rhythm of the dialogue drags and stutters. This doesn’t seem like a failing on stage by the actors so much as a directorial decision that doesn’t pay off.

Similarly, some of the characterization choices disappoint. Hancock Brainerd’s Louis often is less a weak, vacillating king than a dolt whose yelps and squeaks are the obvious options to signify the poor man’s distress. Estrella’s Fersen sometimes slides from being a carefully depicted suave soldier-diplomat to simply a flat character.

More problematic is the Marie that Walshe and Lambert have created. Late in the play Lambert embodies an imprisoned Marie who, when forced into a filthy burlap dress, her head roughly sheared, evokes from us true pity, if not quite sympathy. It’s an aspect of her performance Lambert deserves real praise for.

Until that point, though, Lambert hits the same too few notes too often. Her bulging eyes, sharp cheekbones, and slightly opened mouth do convey effectively the jittery pathos of someone whose sense of self is as contrived as the perfumed sheep and goats populating her ridiculous mock farm. But those gestures, along with a voice that runs at essentially the same register, are all we get for most of the play. It would be unfair, of course, to expect a thoughtful, multidimensional Marie. But Walshe seems not to have pushed for a sufficiently engaging range of ways to show Marie’s emptiness and brittleness.      

Other elements of the production, however, are highly commendable. The sound design by Alex Eizenberg adds more shape and emotional color to this production than any other I can recall at the Gamm. Jessica Hill’s set design is spare but powerfully conveys the opulence and violence of the times; be sure to look for the brutally effective quotation projected on a wall before the play begins. 

A couple of supporting roles deserves particular praise as well. Mycah Hogan plays a revolutionary guard whose ruthlessness is both entirely convincing and fully understandable. Alec Thibodeau masterfully makes himself a sweetly comic sheep who comforts Marie in her loneliness  . . . and then later transforms into something else that bloodily speeds the fallen queen to her doom.

All in all, like the central character, like the play itself, this production of Marie Antoinette is an assemblage of contradictions that isn’t always pleasurable or even satisfying. The failures in each are readily apparent, but nevertheless you should still consider experiencing this depiction of the grotesque, pathetic life of Marie Antoinette. The reason why is that they did, indeed, have to kill Marie to get rid of her. 

Marie Antoinette runs through May 31 at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, 172 Exchange Street, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Tickets $41-49. Box office 401.723.4266. gammtheatre.org.