Review: The Revolutionists
- ThomM
- Jun 26
- 7 min read
In this comedic play set during the French Revolution the pen really is mightier than the sword. But a dagger isn't bad either.
Immersive Scene Los Angeles 2026 Review
Here’s a theatrical riddle.
How can a play claim to be real and not be, yet somehow be both at once? How can fiction double as nonfiction and still deliver a history lesson when its central event never happened? How can a broad 18th‑century romp spoken in 21st‑century language be bitterly funny and unexpectedly poignant at the same time? How can a comedy that fires off more jokes per page than a sitcom still treat the darkest days of the French Revolution with genuine gravity? And how can a play about a play that mocks plays about plays still earn your trust?
The answer to all of it is The Revolutionists. You can trust me. I think.
Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s serious and seriously funny historical fantasy imagines a never‑was sisterhood of four women from the French Revolution era—three drawn from history and one a composite—each notorious or noteworthy in her own way. Famous or infamous is for historians to debate, but all left their mark and ultimately lost their heads for it. Call them heroines, villains, conspirators, or outright badasses, as the production’s promo material does, but in reality they never met, and one never existed at all. Here, though, in this subversive stage offering, they not only meet but hatch plans that might rewrite their place in history.
It’s 1793 in Paris, and the Reign of Terror is in full swing after the execution of King Louis XVI. Robespierre’s Jacobins aren’t faring any better and are busy murdering tens of thousands in their quest to “keep the peace.” Clearly the men have made a mess of things. Maybe some determined women can sort it out.
Enter Olympe De Gouges (Amie Farrell), a celebrated French playwright currently incapable of completing even a sentence of her latest work thanks to extreme writer’s block. She has a story in her—perhaps a musical, maybe even one with puppets—while the stuff of a thousand important plays unfolds just outside her door.
Next arrives her long‑absent friend Marianne Angelle (Nondumiso Tembe), a well‑traveled woman of color from the Caribbean and a genuine spy, practically a walking epic of inspiration if Olympe would forget about the puppets for a moment. Marianne wants something simpler and more urgent: political pamphlets to fuel her fight to end the slave trade that France, chaos or no chaos, is all too willing to let continue in the sugar fields of Haiti. “The French are fighting a revolution for freedom while running a slave colony in the West,” she exhorts. Will Olympe help her?
Then comes a knock on the door from a wild‑eyed young woman, Charlotte Corday (Sarah Pierce), with a mission of her own—to kill Jean‑Paul Marat, the Jacobin journalist she blames for stirring up much of the turmoil on the streets. The would‑be assassin has a plan, an attitude, and a very sharp dagger. What she lacks is a final line, a slogan that will outlive her and explain her actions. Can Olympe provide the words?
And finally, sweeping in with a huge wig, a few unintentionally rude comments, and a surprising amount of self‑awareness, comes the most recognizable figure of all: Marie Antoinette (Lyndsi LaRose). The unlikeliest member of this fearsome foursome, she arrives with a queenly—sorry, formerly queenly—request for the suddenly in‑demand playwright: write her a play that makes her sympathetic, not the spoiled Austrian interloper with sky‑high hair and an obsession with sweets while others starve. “Let them eat cake,” indeed. This one needs a full rewrite.
Now that everyone’s made their entrance—wig, dagger, pamphlets and all—the play’s fireworks begin, and the women that history never allowed to meet start creating some imagined semi-history of their own.
A world where a blocked writer shares her salon with her freedom‑fighter best friend, a killer‑to‑be, and a recently widowed royal sounds far‑fetched, but what better place than a theatre stage to experiment with a wild what‑if that history never allowed. The three real women in this story never met, nor would they have had reason to, but they did share one grim commonality: the last sound they heard was the guillotine’s blade rushing toward them.
Gunderson, along with International City Theatre stalwart director Jamie Torcellini, has the last laugh by creating the possibility. What if a pampered queen bonded with a former slave over their love of their children? What if a celebrated writer, impassioned by her own political convictions, aided a raging criminal before the act? What if three women—and a fourth who never lived but speaks for the forgotten—joined forces in an unlikely burst of 18th‑century girl power? Where else but the stage could such a gathering exist?
With rapid‑fire jokes, witty barbs, sarcasm, and nonstop repartee (including a few pointed digs at a certain globally popular musical about the French Revolution), The Revolutionists, now wrapping up its run at Long Beach’s ICT, breezes through its two acts at record pace. It could probably do without a mid‑show break and sail even smoother as a one‑act, but who doesn’t love an intermission. Rhetorical question.
Beneath all the humor, the show knows it must say something meaningful; otherwise the laughs are for naught. And it does say plenty—about mistreatment, slavery, injustice, power gone mad, and the brutality of revolution. Yet you still laugh, a lot. Credit Gunderson’s gift for writing snappy banter alongside deeply human moments, her cleverly structured script, and Torcellini’s breakneck direction that only pauses when something truly must be heard.
The production is blessed with a quartet of fine actors who balance the darker aspects of the story with the comedy that often takes center stage. Gunderson packs in so many sly jokes that several get lost in the torrent; a post‑show reading of the play is recommended and eye‑opening. Onstage, the lines fly fast, furious, and unapologetically in modern‑spoken fashion, including a few F‑bombs that startled the older Sunday matinee crowd but would likely send a Friday‑night audience into delighted hysterics. Updated slang in an older‑set story isn’t new, but here it sharpens accessibility and heightens urgency as the literal end draws near.
The four leads are all solid and have moments to shine. Farrell, as the excitable dramatist avoiding the drama outside her door in favor of safer creative fare, captures the energy and frustration of an artist at wit’s end. Pierce’s serious‑minded young murderess blends zealotry and youthful exuberance with equal aplomb, keeping both her dagger and her words sharp. Tembe, as the tough Caribbean spy determined to make France confront the horrors of slavery, balances firebrand conviction with warmth and delivers the play’s most emotional moment. LaRose, as the bubbly, over‑pampered aristocrat finally recognizing the absurdity of her former life, is simply the bomb. She has natural comedic chops and the juiciest role, commanding every scene with impeccable timing, especially when attempting to comfort someone—a foreign concept to her—and when interrupting a world‑changing conversation with an infuriatingly noisy candy wrapper she cannot seem to open.
The set design is spartan but effective: Olympe’s Paris study, with its grand entrance doubling as the tribunal and later the scaffolding and guillotine, serves as the all‑performance zone. ICT’s thrust stage provides intimacy but feels limiting in terms of set allowance, placing added reliance on the lighting team to carve out additional spaces. They succeed, though everyone in our group instantly recognized that Olympe’s doorway would eventually become the guillotine.
The guillotine itself is perhaps the only underwhelming aspect of the night. What we get is a wooden frame and what appears to be a projected blade behind sheer cloth, with lights snapping to black at each character’s death. It’s not the director’s most inspired choice. A stronger practical or visual motion effect would have added impact. Thankfully, the sound design team steps up, dramatizing the final cuts with audio force and bringing the rumble of the outside revolution in.
Now back to that opening riddle—and a spoiler alert for anyone planning to catch the production in its closing weekend. In The Revolutionists, the imaginary meeting of these disparate badasses exists only in Olympe’s mind. She wants to write a great play, and does, and it all unfolds in the recesses of her imagination. Her visitors are the created characters of the play within the play. And as her own character takes her last steps toward the blade, the play folds back on itself to the beginning, when Olympe said, “Well that’s not a way to start a comedy, with an execution!” Maybe not, but it’s a powerful way to end one.
The play doesn’t technically end there—there’s a satisfying denouement—but the dramatic narrative has been fully realized with Madame De Gouges’ farewell.
Olympe in real life was found guilty of treason for “consistent and aggressive theatrical actions.” Her words were her death, but it wasn’t only the half‑finished play she wrote about Marie Antoinette that portrayed the queen in a semi‑sympathetic light. She had used her activist voice loudly and often, becoming internationally known after publishing her Declaration of the Rights of Women. She was already on the waiting list.
The narrative remains involving, thoughtful, and reliably funny from start to finish, with only the inclusion of a few short, melancholic songs seeming unnecessary. The Revolutionists may not change the world as its title suggests, but it leaves it a little brighter.
Though The Revolutionists isn’t really an immersive or interactive show, which is our usual domain at Immersive Scene Los Angeles, it almost became one at the top of our performance. When Olympe asked, “What makes a great play?” an octogenarian behind us yelled, “Sex!” Without missing a beat, Amie Farrell stayed in character and continued on unfazed. It was the first laugh of many that afternoon.
by Thom Mills for Immersive Scene Los Angeles
International City Theatre
30 East Seaside Way
Long Beach, CA 90802
June 10-28
