Aimée Beaudoiin and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The Revolutionists, opening tonight at Shadow Theatre, has an intriguing subtitle: “A Comedy. A Quartet. A Revolutionary Dream Fugue. A True Story.”
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And the play — by the continent’s most produced contemporary playwright Lauren Gunderson — set in Paris in 1793 at the apex of the Reign of Terror in the looming presence of Mme La Guillotine, brings together four women of that moment of violent extremism. Three are kidnapped from history: playwright Olympe de Gouges, Marat assassin Charlotte Corday, ex-queen of France Marie Antoinette. The fourth, Marianne Angelle, Black and from the Caribbean, is the imagined embodiment of the French post-Revolution icon of liberté and égalité. And all of them are annotated in the script at the outset as “badass.”
This is the play, written in the shadow of the guillotine that was Trump’s 2016 election victory, director John Hudson has chosen for his finale production as Shadow’s artistic director after 30 years. And for the occasion he’s brought together four exciting Edmonton theatre artists — bad-ass actors/ writers/ directors/ theatre-makers themselves, multi-disciplinary and of very different artistic stripe. .ca had a chance to catch up with them this week to see what a play about writing a play, and creating bold art in risky and turbulent times (ring a bell?), means to them.
Alexandra Dawkins, Aimée Beaudoin, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
Alexandra Dawkins plays Olympe, in real life an artist activist on behalf of equal status and rights for women, and in The Revolutionists a playwright suffering from writer’s block at a high-stakes moment, brainstorming for a title for her new play, as yet unwritten ( maybe “something tantalizing but really vague, like The Revolutionists….”). Dawkins, a U of A theatre school grad whose own directing career began with Shadow’s first “artistic director fellowship,” thinks of Olympe, the presiding mind of The Revolutionists, as Gunderson’s “vehicle to explore fragile white feminism….”
Dawkins thinks of the character as a manifestation of Gunderson’s “internal conversation…. Do my feelings, my viewpoints about abolition and oppression, as a white women making claims, have an impact?.” Olympe is “the playwright’s way of exploring the role of the privileged artist and how effective you can be as an artist in starting a conversation with the world … exploring her own relationship to the colonial world we live in and her impact as a white woman who has the privilege of telling stories. I think Gunderson is wrestling with a lot of those questions.” Questions like “whose story it is to tell….”
Jacquelin Walters, actor, playwright, director, composer and musician, plays Charlotte Corday, the young convent-raised countrywoman who assassinates the journalist Marat, anti-monarchist and witch-hunt inciter of deadly mass violence (in his bathtub, as per the famous Jacques-Louis David painting). Or rather, as Walters amends, she’s playing Olympe’s idea of Charlotte Corday. Walters describes the character, “a young woman with not many life experiences,” convinced “that she was put on earth to kill Marat,” since no one else has the guts to do it.
She muses on that tricky question of the ownership of narrative. She wonders about Olympe and her writer’s block, “her inner editor” paralyzed by the fear of not executing perfectly and “stopping herself from making any statement at all…. Sometimes, as half-decent imperfect people we’re so concerned about getting it a bit wrong” we leave the storytelling to the forces decisively on the wrong side of truth. Au courage: “at least there’s a record, not on the side of authority.” As Kijo Gatama says, citing the play, “if you don’t write it, who will? And if they do, they win….”
Kijo Gatam and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
Gatama plays Marianne, symbol-turned-Black woman. An actor, playwright and poet (her own plays always start as poems then expand), she has some doubts about this tactic. “I love playing her,” she says of Marianne, a freed slave from the Haitian Revolution who’s in Paris on an espionage mission. “But I think of her as a social experiment, to be honest….. She’s in the play to remind the characters (and the audience) that liberty isn’t a silo, that it’s something that has to be across the planet.”
She’s “useful to the writer … to have morality.”
Playwright Gunderson “puts a lot of weight on Marianne in the play…. She pushes (the other characters) to think outside their own selves, to see how privileged they are…. Knock knock, there’s a bigger world out there.”
Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
As for Marie Antoinette, the doomed French queen much vilified for flaunting her royal privilege (“let them eat cake” is long attributed to her), is a comical presence in The Revolutionists. “It starts off with raucous comedy,” says Aimée Beaudoin, who plays her. And Marie turns out to be a surprising character, “obtuse and insensitive, not really listening to what anyone is saying, or caring … and ending up being there for Marianne in her darkest hour.” Beaudoin, playwright, cabaret artist, and co-founder/-producer/-creative muse (with Jeff Halaby) at Spotlight Cabaret — one of Edmonton theatre’s bona fide success stories — is a specialist in comedy. And she points to “a dichotomy” we all share, “a shallow silly side and a deeper, more heartfelt side.”
For the cast, The Revolutionists — and they all pay tribute to Hudson in this his artistic director farewell piece — has inspired reflection on their own role as career artists working in risky, often hostile times, with consequences, albeit without the ultimate price tag of the guillotine.
Dawkins’s own favourite theatrical form is bouffon clowning since it “gives artists permission to ask really hard questions, to talk directly to the king” so to speak, “while the king is in the room … taking the mickey out of yourself in order to speak truth.” The appeal, for Dawkins, a new artistic associate at Thou Art Here Theatre, is that “I really really like direct address, talking directly to the audience.” She’s creating a new bouffon play Saboteur for her clown character. And she’s directing the latest iteration of Sophie May Healey’s clown show Hysteria’s House for the Found Festival.
Beaudoin, who appeared in Shadow’s Slumberland Motel with Julien Arnold seven years ago, launched Spotlight “when Jeff and I weren’t getting gigs,” as she says cheerfully, is well aware that comedy, her métier, comes with particular risks in these cautious times. Maybe danger is the appeal. “The world is scary,” she says. “And you kind of have to push through…. But putting yourself out there is always scary.”
She and Halaby, who never see a fourth wall they don’t want to knock down, are currently re-working a piece they created seven years ago (Lady Marmalade opens May 1). Looking at the original now, she says, “we realized we were scared to write the kind of comedy we actually enjoy.” The new version won’t be like that.
“After five years of drafting and workshopping,” Gatama, fresh from a starring role in Jameela McNeil’s Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen at SkirtsAfire, is now involved in final edits for the publication of her play Hyena’s Trail. It’s in an art exhibit (till March 28) at Co*Lab. And she’ll soon be performing at the Edmonton Poetry Festival. “Shadow was the first company I auditioned for professionally, when I was just 19 or 20 and I’d just been accepted for the BFA program at the U of A.” Being in Hudson’s final show as artistic director has a beautiful full-circle arc for her.
Walters is writing and will direct a new show, a two-hander operetta (or is it musical theatre? she laughs) with hints of her love of G&S, in which her theatre partners Michael Watt and Nicole Maloney will appear at Spotlight Cabaret during the Fringe.
And meanwhile there’s the actor’s challenge of being in a play about the creation of a play, being characters fashioned and edited in the mind of a character who’s a playwright. Ah, in a comedy that begins and ends with four beheadings. How badass is that?
PREVIEW
The Revolutionists
Theatre: Shadow Theatre
Written by: Lauren Gunderson
Directed by: John Hudson
Starring: Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: tonight through April 18
Tickets: shadowtheatre.org
