Let them both eat cake
On the gridiron, the legendary Harvard-Yale clash is simply called “The Game.” Off the field, the competition between the two Ivy universities can be equally intense. Students from the schools frequently engage in a war of words and wit in an effort to outdo each other. In the end, it took an infamous French queen to bring the two longtime rivals together, at least on the artistic front. For the first time, Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) and the Yale Repertory Theatre are collaborating on a stage production, the world premiere of “Marie Antoinette.” The “barbed and brassy tragicomedy,” as it is billed, traces the life of French King Louis XVI’s wife, an 18th-century child bride from Austria who was initially embraced by the French, and later condemned by them to the guillotine. Legend has it that she once said of hungry French peasants, “Let them eat cake,” though there is no...