Review: The cake does not rise in Actor’s Express’ ‘Marie Antoinette’

The tale of the famous French queen may have held up in our cultural imagination for so many centuries because of that beguiling contrast between the grotesque and the beautiful. Marie’s short life has so thoroughly seeped into our public consciousness that it even showed up in the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies last year in heavy metal band Gojira’s stunning performance.

Credit: Photo by Casey Gardner Ford

Credit: Photo by Casey Gardner Ford

So this play presents the fascinating and timely prospect of exploring the original woman celebrity scapegoat — the 2007 Britney Spears of her day, if you will. She’s a woman who became royalty as a teenager and expected to maintain a certain standard of living as the state figurehead but who was executed for exemplifying the excesses she had been trained to embody.

(At multiple points, Marie laments that she wasn’t so much raised as “built.” “Sometimes I feel like a game other people play but without me,” she says.)

At least, that’s the premise that I’m going to assume Adjmi began with as he penned this rendition of the familiar story. I say assume because, in this production, we never get a clear idea of how to feel about the characters or what they mean. Are they funny? Mockable? Satirical? Or genuinely tragic? Not sure.

Worse, it’s unclear moment by moment how we’re supposed to feel about the French Revolution or its participants. They’re clearly the looming threat to our protagonists, but are they villains? Like so many overthrows of corrupt governments, the historic event was bloody and complicated, but it also emerged out of deep and undeniable inequity and desperation. (Like so many coups, too, it paved the way for another authoritarian to swoop in, in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte.)

At any rate, the play starts by presenting Marie’s life with her Wolfie-in-“Amadeus”-levels-of-silly husband, King Louis XVI. They’re living in one of the most extravagant palaces of all time, wearing some of the most sumptuous, Met Gala-esque fashion, cut off from the public and unaware that most of the people they’re governing happen to be starving.

Then, we move through Marie’s eventual attempts to evolve with the changing times, scaling down the extravagances because they’re unpopular. Finally, we get their attempts to flee as a family as mobs of thousands overtake the palace and other havens for the aristocracy — all the way to eventual capture and death.

(I should add that one of the play’s strengths is its wrestling with the difference between myth and reality and how misunderstood characterizations are passed along.)

There’s a cute moment in the script when Marie lets fly her famous line, “Let them eat cake!” to encourage people to eat what they want, rather than the way it is usually framed, as a callous indifference to starving peasants. (It’s also a line that historians agree never happened and may have been invented by Rousseau.)

The dynamic scenic design by Kat Conley and the ornate costume design by Jennifer Schottstaedt knock it out of the park with copious echoes of the pop-y 2006 Sofia Coppola film.

Hanging tightly to “Bridgerton’s” finely embroidered coattails, the show’s soundtrack is nonstop orchestral renditions of pop songs ranging from Lorde and Chappell Roan to Foo Fighters and the Eurythmics. But that musical choice feels less novel and amusing than it does overused and distracting.

It’s a shame we don’t get more direction because this play is, in many ways, ever more relevant than it was when it debuted in 2013, just as Obama’s second term was beginning. Today, we have a powerful oligarchy making unprecedented power moves out of the Oval Office. You may even wince when you hear Marie blurt, “I am sick of hearing about America. America is a doomed experiment!”

Credit: Photo by Casey Gardner Ford

Credit: Photo by Casey Gardner Ford

This play was also written over a decade before Adjmi’s most famous and successful work to date, “Stereophonic,” which took over Broadway last year and became the record-holder for play with the most Tony nominations ever. That show centers on a Fleetwood Mac-esque band recording an album as they sit on the brink of breakout stardom — and perhaps that’s a stronger variation of the same themes less successfully explored in “Marie Antoinette.”

Again, it’s a shame. Because Donya K. Washington has directed wonderfully dark and complex pieces at Actor’s Express before. But we get neither the full biting comedy potential nor the off-the-wall soapy-ness of, say, Cole Escola’s loosely historic Mary Todd Lincoln tour de force, “Oh Mary!”

Often, the dialogue feels like it’s in the playwright’s rather than the character’s voice. She squabbles with her brother, Josef, and she argues with the king. We get thrown into the characters’ interpersonal dramas without being shown why we should care.

Case in point: There’s an alternately off-putting and menacing sheep puppet character (yep, you heard me) that keeps turning up, but even that never quite stretches to the surrealist lengths one imagines it could.

Instead of fully mining ideas that can color and inform our present moment, this show gives us a weirdly impartial rundown of events in the first half (or imagined/embellished versions) and some confounding shifts in tone and themes in the second half.

Toward the second half, as Marie unravels, Alexandra Ficken finally gets something to sink her teeth into. In a small but impactful role as one of the revolutionaries tasked with cutting the deposed queen’s hair before her trial, actor Ase Freed steals the entire scene, explaining to Marie why the people have revolted.

Ultimately, despite a capable cast, some interesting visual flourishes and the promise of more, we’re left with handfuls of mostly icing.

THEATER REVIEW

“Marie Antoinette”

Through Feb. 23. An Actor’s Express coproduction with Oglethorpe University Theatre. Tickets, $51.50 with discounts available. Conant Performing Arts Center at Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road NE, Brookhaven. 404-607-7469. actors-express.com

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Alexis Hauk has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines, including Time, the Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. Having grown up in Decatur, Alexis returned to Atlanta in 2018 after a decade living in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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