Marie Antoinette sure could have used an image consultant. Historians generally describe the French queen as a kind-hearted and intelligent woman. She may have been frivolous, but she wasn’t the empty-headed, out-of-touch ninny of popular imagination.
“Marie Antoinette didn’t even say ‘Let them eat cake,’ but that’s what everyone remembers her for,” says Kimberly Gilbert, who portrays the doomed royal in Woolly Mammoth’s season opener, “Marie Antoinette.” “That just goes to show the power of a smear campaign.”
Though Gilbert grew up “solidly middle class,” she feels a kinship with the pampered queen. It helps that they both spent their childhoods outdoors, climbing trees and exploring nature, Gilbert says. “I think that has a lot to do with how she reacted to being cooped up as this queen in a palace of walls and mirrors,” Gilbert says. “No wonder there was a restless spirit inside of her that wanted to rebel.”
Both Marie Antoinette and Gilbert came from big families — Marie Antoinette was the second youngest of 16 siblings, and Gilbert is the youngest of nine.
“Being the baby of a large family means that you get left to your own devices, and you get to roam free,” Gilbert says. “I keep thinking about how tough it must have been for her, in her final years, to be imprisoned in a tiny confined space.”
Tried on trumped-up charges of treason, sexual abuse and other transgressions, Marie didn’t wallow in self pity as her execution approached. Neither does the play, director Yury Urnov says. “We never let anything dwell in farce or tragedy or realism too long,” he says.
Absurdist touches, like a talking sheep who warns Marie about civil unrest in Paris, keep things light. The set’s centerpiece is a working Jacuzzi, used by Marie and two of her fabulous friends as they nibble truffles and dish on fashion trends. (Whether the play takes place now, in the 1700s or somewhere in between is intentionally ambiguous.)
“Clearly we aren’t going for historical accuracy,” Urnov says.
“Marie Antoinette” aims to comment on our modern era, where the rich and the poor are divided by an ever-widening gap, and where we lionize celebrities only to crucify them later, he says.
“The play brings the world of her life into a contemporary atmosphere that will hopefully bring a good amount of humanity to this otherwise two-dimensional person we all think we know,” Urnov says.
Let them eat donuts
For Thursday’s performance of “Marie Antoinette,” Woolly is hosting a Cake and Ale happy hour at 6 p.m., featuring six Bluejacket Brewery beers paired with donuts from GBD (all of which will correspond to characters from the show). For $60, you can eat and drink all you want, then stumble into the theatre for the play at 8 p.m.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW; through Oct. 12, various times, $40-$78.
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