“The Revolutionists” at City Theatre

The Pittsburgh Tatler: The characters in Lauren Gunderson’s 2016 play The Revolutionists are all fascinating, powerful women from the history of the French Revolution: playwright Olympe de Gouges (Daina Michelle Griffith), an early feminist who authored the “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” Charlotte Corday (Moira Quigley), the Girondiste who murdered the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub; Marie Antoinette (Drew Leigh Williams), the recently deposed Queen of France; and “La Marianne” – not really a historical figure, but a symbol of the revolution, here fleshed out as the fictional Marianne Angelle, a Caribbean freedom fighter (Shamika Cotton). These four figures would likely never have come together in history (they shared neither political orientation nor class/social status), but in Gunderson’s imagining they have something in common – they are all women whose stories have been wrested from them by history, and who, each in their own right, exhibited a heroism overlooked or underrecognized by the historical record.