PHOTO CREDIT: Ross Zentner
Marianne: “I want people to live their lives and make babies and eat too much and do experimental theater.”
Olympe: “Now, that’s a France I can believe in.”
It’s for good reasons that Lauren Gunderson is the most produced living playwright in American professional non-profit theater today. The notes I took during Next Act Theatre’s production of her 2016 play The Revolutionists are largely lines of dialogue, beautifully landed by a perfect cast under Laura Gordon’s perfect direction. Utterly of our moment but set in 1793 during the guillotining heyday of the Reign of Terror in Paris, the play is a comic dream fugue with a deceptively simple subject: the need for stories.
Olympe: “I call it Meta Theater. The point is to be a little confusing.”
Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and feminist during the French Revolution. Cassandra Bissell plays her with an absolute understanding of an artist’s dual fears: of not making a difference and of making one. Her character’s—indeed, Gunderson’s—quick turns to self-mockery in an effort to balance the excitement of what just might prove valuable, even (dare one think it?) visionary were brilliantly managed. This is the stuff of good comedy, and the opening night audience laughed heartily all evening as great line after great line flew by. Thanks to the artists, we were always also aware of the stakes.
Marianne: “Then write the truth of an artist staring down a civil war.”
Leah Dutchin plays Marianne Angelle, Gunderson’s voice of sanity, with a maturity that feels hard-won. The character is a representative of the people of Haiti who worked to end slavery in all the French colonies. She’s in Paris to spy on the new government. Playing the young radical Charlotte Corday, determined to assassinate Jean-Paul Marat and ready to die for it, Eva Nimmer is as passionate and brave as Greta Thunberg before the U.N. Bree Beelow is warm, funny, childish and finally adult as Marie-Antoinette, aware that her historical reputation is in need of a rewrite.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Charlotte: “What the play is about does not matter. What your life is about? That matters.”
Marianne: “Let us laugh too loudly and too often and call out the hypocrites of our age until they are the butt of the joke.”
Marie: “Where the hell are we headed, and why is it not a beach?”
See this show.
Through Sunday, Oct. 20, at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets, visit nextact.org.
