I guess it’s official now: Marie Antoinette is a 21st-century American cultural metaphor in the tragic airhead/poor-little-rich-kid vein. A sort of Danube Valley Girl. A Habsburg Kardashian. Barely literate yet thoroughly steeped in the lore of the Pradas and Louboutins of her era, our Marie has been bred for nothing but display. She’s trapped in a luxurious vacuum—a celebrity without achievements, a personality without self-knowledge, a victim of privilege condemned to play consort to a sexually incompetent recessive called Louis XVI. Even her forays into back-to-nature simplicity are expensive fakes. Proto-detox spas, really. She can’t help it: she’s Marie Antoinette. It takes a revolution to set her free, although probably not in the way she’d hoped.
From there we visit the familiar landmarks of Marie Antoinette’s life, including motherhood, a reluctant affair, incarceration after the French Revolution, the attempt to flee to Austria (carrying Louis Vuitton luggage, of course), and her final tumbrel ride into history. The show exploits the surreal possibilities of the theater—most notably by conjuring Alan Wilder, equal parts ominous and silly as a talking sheep who pays visits to Marie at significant junctures. And Adjmi allows himself a much more acidic tone than Coppola does. His Marie can be appallingly mean and ridiculously stupid. She directs flashes of infantile anger at her son, has to ask what a windmill is for. Her narcissism is so complete that it prevents her from recognizing that she’s in danger.
Through 5/10: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM Steppenwolf Theatre Company 1655 N. Halsted 312-335-1650 steppenwolf.org $20-$86
