Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi (review)

David Adjmi’s plays usually lacerate the self-satisfied smugness of the privileged classes, so one might expect his recent work, Marie Antoinette, to follow suit. Here, however, Adjmi treats the leading figure empathetically. Stylistically reminiscent of Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) with its extravagant wigs, decorative cakes, and neo-punk soundtrack, director Rebecca Taichman’s production shares the current revisionist attitude toward the queen of France, initiated by Lady Antonia Fraser’s 2002 biography. Depicted as a naïve adolescent and unwillingly subject to sovereign status by her arranged marriage, Marie Antoinette emerges as the tragic victim of historical forces. Adjmi effectively uses the two-act structure both to portray her rise and fall and the emergence of her personhood as the accoutrements of monarchy are stripped away and she struggles to understand her place in history. The production underscores this development through tonal contrast, moving from the conspicuous extravagance of Versailles to the minimalist monochromatic set of the Bastille, ultimately conveying both as spaces of imprisonment.

The glossy proscenium stage, with its gold-on-white arabesque wallpaper beneath Plexiglas, framed the characters like illustrations of a picture book. Just as Andy Warhol’s iconic prints of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy freeze them in time, the historical impression of Marie Antoinette typically has been one of material extravagance and cruel indifference to the plight of others. The first half of Adjmi’s play cast Marie as a toy doll forced to play-act scenes of royal privilege. In an opening tableau reminiscent of Beckett’s players in urns, Marie (Marin Ireland) and her ladies-in-waiting ate cakes and candy, weighed down by their dresses, jewelry, and three-foot-high wigs suspended above their heads by wires. The theme of the aristocracy imprisoned within their roles and performing against the cyclorama of history was all too clear. Never permitted to leave the stage, Marie changed her gowns and wigs in front of the audience while the servants delivered trays of pastries, their mechanistic movements portending the wheels of fate surrounding her.

Adjmi further capitalizes on the fact that Marie never learned to speak French properly so as to highlight not only her lack of literacy, but also her mental limitations—for example, laughingly dismissing Jean-Jacques Rousseau as unimportant. Her vapid conversational topics and style emphasized her obliviousness as she modishly bragged to friends that because of her, hairstyles became so high, they had to raise the roofs of carriages. Dressed in a pink balloon dress and ruby-red stiletto heels, Marie threw tantrums, shrieked at her husband for not giving her a child, and asked her brother (Fred Arsenault) such infantile questions about ruling Austria that she trivialized affairs of state. While Louis XVI (Stephen Rattazzi) similarly lacked regality, playing on the floor with broken clocks and stammering replies to his young wife, Marie’s ignorance of the growing political turbulence implied a form of cognitive imprisonment.

The second act charted Marie’s attempts to understand her own role within the political events transpiring around her, despite her inability to think critically. At the end of the first act, the angry French mob swarms Versailles accompanied by sounds of thunder and a “dirt drop” (cork) that descends upon the stage. This black deposit transformed the set into a prison encircling her, now covered with soot. The loss of the court setting denoted the loss of her monarchical significance. In response, Marie repeatedly attempts to make sense of who she is, if not a monarch. She gives orders and a guard spits in her face; there are no servants to draw her bath; she relinquishes her jewelry; and, finally, her husband and son are taken away. Without the costumes and props to solidify her identity as queen, Marie recalls important events and people in her past to give the trajectory of her life some meaning. While the first act demonstrated an artificial identity sustained by pastries, frocks, and elaborate...