*****Mary Said What She Said

That's Mary, Queen of Scots -- and no matter that not much of a written record survives

IsabelleHuppert in Mary Said What She Said. Photo: Lucie Jansch

***** Mary Said What She Said, Skirball Center, to March 2

Courez, vite! You have only tonight and tomorrow to catch Isabelle Huppert’s lamentably brief run playing Mary, Queen of Scots in a surprisingly celeritous, hyper-minimalist staging directed by legendary marathoner Robert Wilson.

For this dazzling showcase imported from Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville (a pre-show curtain film clip suggests a cute traditional circus act), novelist Darryl Pinkney extrapolated fictitious but feasible journal entries (drawn from contested “historical” letter fragments) to sketch out the beleaguered queen’s downfall and exile. Surtitles display his text; Huppert delivers the French translation.

Encased in a ruche-necked, period-perfect glittering black gown by Jacques Renaud, Huppert starts out perfectly still and then manages, imperceptibly, to inch-walk around a broad stage framed top and bottom by two blinding horizontal lines of white light. On occasion, she breaks out in wild dancing or abruptly turns a violent green (shades of Margaret Hamilton).

Fani Sarantari’s sound design is so precise, it’s often difficult to distinguish between Huppert expounding on the spot and the recorded snippets slipped in. Her delivery, even live, occasionally accelerates from normal-speech moderato to a break-neck presto. (Ludovico’s neo-classicist music sometimes seems to be playing tag.) The text accretes slowly, becoming a ledger of Mary’s assorted grievances during her long, incident-ridden life. (It’s safe to conjecture that one of her ladies-in-waiting -- all were also named Mary – in some way did her wrong.)

During the current period of our own history, as we’re forced to contemplate the divine right of kings – or at any rate the power wielded pro tem by someone aspiring to the role – an off-the-wall study of magisterial trauma seems unexpectedly à propos. It will likely be a long wait before New York is treated to such a tour de force again, so if you can snag a ticket, drop everything and go.