Marie Antoinette’s tragic story reads like the 18th-century version of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Decapitated.” Mind-blowing luxury and entitlement followed by a gory comeuppance: No wonder she continues to capture imaginations in our age of celebrity worship.
The bracing new show “Marie Antoinette” is just the latest addition to an increasingly bulging canon.
David Adjmi’s play shares more than a title with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 movie starring Kirsten Dunst: Both have a brash, deliberately anachronistic vibe and lots of macarons.
Marie (Marin Ireland) is first seen nibbling the sweet confections with her ladies-in-waiting, Yolande de Polignac (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and Thérèse de Lamballe (Jennifer Ikeda).
The trio is like a cross between chatty soccer moms and Valley Girls. Ireland — who made a memorable suicidal terrorist on TV’s “Homeland” — is virtuosic as a petulant starlet who enjoys her job’s perks but also misses her simpler life in Austria.
“There’s all these f—ing rules, I can’t take it,” she rails. “I mean, I know I’m acting all victimized, but do you know what it’s like having people watch you dress, undress, eat dinner every night like you’re some specimen?”
She doesn’t get much support from her diminutive husband, Louis XVI (Steven Rattazzi), an ineffectual ruler whose only passion is for clocks.
When the Revolution upends their world, the queen is as stunned as Kim Kardashian would be if readers of OK! magazine took up their pitchforks. Switching gears, Ireland is heart-wrenching as a broken woman who can’t understand why those peons are so angry.
If only the writing were as sophisticated as her performance.
Adjmi’s previous outing, “3C,” brilliantly revealed a cruel underside to “Three’s Company.” Here the M.O. is less subversive because he’s not telling us anything we don’t already know. The switch in tone halfway through doesn’t quite work, either, even if a scene involving a philosophical sheep (David Greenspan) is winningly surreal.
And yet the show as a whole is invigorating, thanks to the remarkable cast and director Rebecca Taichman’s stylish production.
The tiny Soho Rep has been reconfigured so that the stage is more than 50 feet long and very narrow, giving a widescreen feel. This creates an impression of isolation and loneliness for the characters, floating about Riccardo Hernandez’s spare set. It’s an emptiness that all the macarons in the world can’t fill.