‘Gotta go make some hi-story’: The Revolutionists at Shadow, a review

The Revolutionists, a comedy (well, “mostly a comedy” as billed) by the American playwright Lauren Gunderson, on stage in the Shadow Theatre season, is bookended with a killer sound effect: the storied metallic swoosh of the guillotine.

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Yup, high stakes, with a vertical drop. Inside that historic framework, a playwright with writer’s block is fretting away struggling in vain to write something meaningful and profound and, you know, rise to the occasion: it’s 1793 in Paris, mid-Reign of Terror, and there’s just been a big-deal Revolution which seems to be going wrong. “There’s drama everywhere you look these days. Why can’t I write any of it?” wails Olympe (Alexandra Dawkins). “Everyone is making history except me.”

Re-worked from the real-life playwright Olympe de Gouges who lost her head for feminist activism, she’s the character — playwright as flawed anti-hero — at the centre of this sassy, self-mocking, often funny comedy, in full period regalia (costumes by Rebecca Cypher,  sound design by Darrin Hagen, who takes his cue from a script that artfully mixes the 18th century and the contemporary).

Alexandra Dawkins, Aimée Beaudoin, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Soon Olympe’s chamber (a classical multi-doored round in Cindi Zuby’s clever design) will be invaded by her old friend Marianne Angelle (Kijo Gatama), a Black Haitian revolutionary and freedom-fighter and spy, keen to get her pal to put fiction aside in favour of reality, and write a pamphlet or two. She’s the conscience of the play, and the only character who’s imagined (from the French iconography of the Republic) and not borrowed from history.

Jacquelin Walters and Kijo Gatama in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Then Charlotte Corday (Jacquelin Walters), the young assassin who’s about to get famous by stabbing the Jacobin big-shot mouthpiece Marat in his bathtub — “because he’s awful.” She’s looking for some snazzy last words from “the last lady playwright in Paris” she can deliver at her inevitable execution.

And then, who should show up but Marie Antoinette (Aimée Beaudoin), a perky bubble-head hoping for a re-write on her image, tarnished by bad publicity she figures. “The country used to like me…. I just need better press,” she says. She’s perplexed by the revolutionary chaos.“Was all this because of me? Am I too pretty?”

The fun of The Revolutionists, and also its darker side, is that these characters in search of an author all want something different from the beleaguered playwright. And for her part Olympe just desperately wants theatre to be important — to be a star, make a big splash by writing something important, create a dramatic hit that will slay at the box office, and get great reviews. “This is our time to make a better world for everyone,” she declares grandly, “everyone … who sees my plays.”

Gunderson, a deft comic writer, is hard on theatre and the self-importance of its practitioners, and that spirit of self-assessment (via some very funny theatre zingers) means that The Revolutionists touches down lightly in its dark world. And as it becomes a play within a play, there’s something heartwarming about its doubts. Is having a story enough?

So, a play about theatre vs real life, or theatre and real life: that is The Revolutionists’ question. In John Hudson’s production (his last Shadow show as artistic director after a 30-year run), Dawkins plays Olympe boldly as a sort of manic grotesque, a histrionic clown in perpetual motion on the stage in this heightened performance, flinging her arms like a manic marionette, shrieking and chattering, ready to levitate at a moment’s notice. Truly, you can’t take your eyes off her, but I wonder if it’s a performance that’s a bit overheated in adding another layer of comedy to the comedy.

Anyhow, the playwright here is something of a tiring high-maintenance upstager, needing to be tamed by her own characters. And, to be sure, this is a play that wonders about that.

Marianne, who has a certain calm skeptical intensity about her in Gatama’s fine performance, comes as something of a relief. As Charlotte Corday, who gets off on “the feel of righteous fury,” has a kind of breezy youthful charm in Walters’ performance. The scenes between Charlotte and Marianne as her acting coach have an odd kind of sweetness to them.

Aimée Beaudoiin and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The funniest, and most surprising, character is the ex-Queen played by Beaudoin as an unexpectedly satirical critic of the theatre, with a certain sharp-eyed producer glint about her. If it’s not a romantic comedy, she tells Olympe, “nobody will come.” She’s serious about shallowness, as Beaudoin, a gifted comic actor, conveys so amusingly. And then it turns out she has an offhand but surprisingly sturdy feminist streak, and a steadfastness about female friendship, witness a scene of unexpected emotional heft between Marie and Marianne at a moment of crisis.

Sometimes, Marie says brightly, a revolution needs a woman’s touch. And so does writing for the theatre in stressful times, like our own. A validation of what theatre can be makes for a lively evening in the company of a clever comedy.

REVIEW

The Revolutionists

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Lauren Gunderson

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 18

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org