There is nothing like being in on the joke, and in The Revolutionists, many of the jokes are about how an audience experiences a play. To laugh during Lost Nation Theater‘s sprightly production is to become a costar. In flouncy period gowns, the characters continually step out of the French Revolution to bust the fourth wall. The time is 1793, and the guillotine looms, but it’s no match for a comic perspective on life.
Lauren Gunderson’s 2016 play draws humor from metatheatrical gambits but also from screwball anachronism and the dark truth that our political problems look distressingly similar over the centuries. In many of her plays, Gunderson features actual pioneering women from science, history or literature; this time, her heroes are trying to live through the Reign of Terror.
The guillotine looms, but it’s no match for a comic perspective on life.
In a single room, Gunderson places Olympe de Gouges, political activist and playwright; Charlotte Corday, who plans to assassinate the violent Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat; and Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France. To these real-life personages, the playwright adds a composite character: the spy Marianne Angelle, based on real activists seeking rights for slaves in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.
The women materialize as Olympe invokes them, but Gunderson has invented the idea that they intersected. The room is Olympe’s salon, with her writing desk awash in papers, but she can fill it with her imagination as she tries to conjure up a new play about the revolution and a possible political future for France. Olympe dreams that art alone can lead society.
Gunderson makes up plenty, but her characters are quite true. The Olympe in this show, muttering about a play she wants to write, is talking about an actual play the real de Gouges started and which includes salvos of direct address just like what Gunderson uses. For example, de Gouges becomes a character in her own play to confront Marie Antoinette about the role of royalty.
In The Revolutionists, Olympe struggles to create art that could change civilization. But how does one respond to political power that suppresses thought and is free to brand any action as treason? The characters must spend the play under constant threat of arrest, mock trial and a climb to the guillotine with only a moment for last words.
It is for such last words that Marianne, Marie Antoinette and Charlotte turn to Olympe. As a writer, she should be good at providing the statement that preserves for history a shortened, otherwise misunderstood life. Marie Antoinette’s cake thing? It was a misquote, months before, but maybe now Olympe could write her something?
The production, directed by Katie Genzer, is two surrealistic hours of Olympe’s heroic efforts to imagine a play by stepping inside and outside of history and hopping between character and meta-character. Genzer keeps the performers moving to balance the script’s amusing talkiness and tunes the ensemble to a harmonic comic pitch.
The play works like a pinball machine. Whenever the politics gets a little too dark, the playwright has two flippers to launch the ball to safety: the wit of theatrical self-reference or the sweet lure of art that gives Olympe hope and purpose. Ding-ding-ding-ding!
Though it’s consistently fun to hit those bumpers, it does mean that the show never settles into a story about anything except itself. Yet it stays enjoyably fresh and maintains a loose, experimental feeling as it bounds from serious to silly and back.
And today, the pursuit of art and truth probably needs an ironic cloak to hide behind. The biggest laughs last Thursday marked parallels to our current politics. Comedy is easier than social idealism, and even Olympe can’t turn égalité into an action plan.
Abby Paige, as Olympe, is spectacular at showing a character changing her mind. Olympe is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back writer, and Paige energizes each one of her strides so that the character’s contradictions become her reason for living. Paige shows the playwright plunging deep into feminism in the midst of male anarchy, then turning to grab hard at the reins of her bucking plot. As this production’s engine, Paige never falters.
Stacia Richard, playing Charlotte, explains with youthful certainty her plan to murder Marat and end the violence he’s stirring up. It’s hard to build a character while the onstage playwright is audibly improvising the role, and Richard oscillates between an introvert’s conviction and an extrovert’s spunk. Then Charlotte gets to stop talking and act, and Richard makes it powerful.
As Marie Antoinette, Stoph Scheer fills the space under her ornate wig with a startled, bow-lipped oh planted on a bone-white complexion. Spoiled, ingenuous, miffed and secretly quite nervous, the last queen of France no longer has people to grant her every wish. This Marie Antoinette never completely surrenders the fantasy that the worst will never come for someone in a pink gown this grand.
Brittney Malik, as Marianne, plumbs the play’s emotional and political depths most fully. Malik uses clearheaded eagerness to make Marianne’s idealism glow. Centuries later, Marianne’s anti-slavery crusade is now easy to comprehend, but Malik demonstrates how broad a reach it was in 1793. Her sacrifices give the play a human anchor.
Mark Evancho’s set and Cora Fauser’s costumes strike just the right hyperbolic notes. Fauser gives each character a sturdy visual base from which to work, so that every comic exaggeration is rooted in the perfect swirling skirt. Evancho’s set is both simple and cluttered with possibilities, so every move feels inventive.
Gunderson has written a comedic experience that jostles the audience with self-referential tropes. At times it feels like she’s building a ladder tall enough for us to see the meaning of it all — is it art? Women’s rights? Survival? Sacrifice? The perspective is never grand enough, so a view of nothing but funny stuff will do.
In the final scene, comedy and tragedy achieve an equilibrium, floating on the essence of theater. The whiplash of false starts and the fine, fast pace finally resolve. With genuine poignancy, the ending is pure theater technique: Costume, lighting and performance work their magic once again.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Heads Will Spin | Theater review: The Revolutionists, Lost Nation Theater”
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
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