Molly Billman and Candida Celaya (Photo by Beatrice Casagrán)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Ophelia’s Jump
Through March 30
RECOMMENDED
Playwright Lauren Gunderson has become one of the most produced American playwrights of our era. One indication of this is Ophelia’s Jump’s staging of Gunderson’s The Revolutionists in Upland, coming a mere nine months after Theatre 40 presented the same play in Beverly Hills.
Set in the 18th century, the play is the fever-dream of a female playwright named Olympe de Gouges (Andrea Stradling) struggling to write a play. She’s prompted by a visiting free Black woman and spy from the Caribbean, Marianne Angelle (Medina Senghore), who provokes Olympe to pen something, possibly feminist, about the French Revolution which is unfolding directly outside Olympe’s window.
We see a guillotine on an upstage screen, prompting Olympe to remark that one can’t open a play with a guillotine. In terms of revolution, have we come full circle from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, penned in 1961? That play opens with a second-string critic sitting in a balcony waiting for a production to begin. “You can’t start with a pause,” he remarks to a fellow critic. He, like Olympe and Marianne, and Charlotte Corday (Molly Billman) and Marie Antoinette (Candida Celaya) will be pulled into the action, risking their lives doing so.
The Revolutionists is a clever play that’s too much in love with its own cleverness, with its self-referencing repartee, with its ongoing commentary on its own metatheatrical devices, wink wink.
Perhaps this suggests that I didn’t care for the play, which is not the case. For me, from the Department of Let Them Eat Cake, it’s a dessert with frosting that’s so sweet it makes the teeth ache. But the cake itself is substantive nonetheless, supported (baked?) by Sheila Malone’s nicely modulated staging of a capable and at times endearing quartet of actors.
Gunderson accomplishes an admirable feat in laying out the dichotomy of conflicting powers: the power of words versus the power of the blade. Does the wordsmith’s reluctance to enter the fray of politics that’s literally knocking at her door render her a coward? Or does her strength lie in her determination to pen words that put her life at risk? Whether or not the pen is mightier than the sword becomes what might be called a legacy question. The words live on, beyond the grave, and possibly change the world. Is that worth losing one’s head for? What did the Reign of Terror actually accomplish? The questions go mercifully unanswered.
Billman’s Charlotte Corday appears fearless in her prelude to and aftermath of assassinating Jean-Paul Marat, a French political theorist and physician. She’s all stridency, until it melts away with her march to the guillotine.
Celaya’s Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake!”) is a marvelous character, drolly rendered. She’s a monster of indifference in the history books, but on this stage she’s actually quite tender in her endeavor to salvage her reputation. In Celaya’s hands, she’s world-weary, witty, blazingly self-aware and calmly cognizant of the nightmare that awaits her. She simply trying “to set the record straight” before she loses her head. Her creator, Olympe, describes her as sympathetic, and that’s exactly what we get, which is a sweet turn.
Credit also goes to Michael Gilland’s atmospheric lighting design that, in conjunction with the uncredited soundscape, complements the melodrama lurking beneath the repartee.
Ophelia’s Jump, 2009 Porterfield Way, Suite H, Upland. Thurs., 7:30 pm, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; thru March 30. https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?actions=4&p=2 Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes including intermission
