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In 2006, director Sofia Coppola’s great biopic of Marie Antoinette reimagined the doomed French monarch in 21st-century terms — as a malaise-stricken postmodern teenager and feminist martyr who could care less if anybody ate cake. Less than two years later, Joel Gross followed on Coppola’s heels with his three-character play Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, an equally subversive new take on the beheaded cult queen. Gross blurred fact and fiction, inventing a love triangle with a historical foundation: the growing friendship between the queen and her official portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, presented in Gross’ play as a cunning social climber. Their lives are complicated by a character Gross invented: a left-wing aristocrat named Alexis. This turmoil brushes against the tumult of the French Revolution just outside the gates, in the years before Antoinette would meet the guillotine. Last produced here in 2008 by the now-defunct Caldwell Theatre, The Color of Flesh returns in a stripped-down staged reading from Outre Theatre Company, the latest installment in its season of “outsiders” that has included productions of Othello and the political drama Back of the Throat.
Sabrina Lynn Gore, Seth Trucks, and Katherine Amadeo star in this two-night-only production, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the JM Family Studio at Broward Center for the Performing Arts, located at 201 SW Fifth Ave. in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $30. Call 954-462-0222, or visit browardcenter.org.
Fri., March 6, 2015
