In Medea Res

An ancient GREEK FEMME FATALE is the American theatre’s passion of the moment.

By Celia Wren

Mother must, after all, know best—just take a look at Medea. Twenty-five centuries after the playwright Euripides sent her packing off stage in a dragon-drawn chariot, the infamous child-slayer is wreaking domestic havoc on stages across America. So far in the 2001-2002 season, Milwaukee’s Chamber Theatre, the Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, in Topanga, Calif., have all mounted translations of the Greek original; Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s version runs in Minneapolis through April 21; Classical Theater of Harlem’s production opens in New York this month; and a production by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, starring Fiona Shaw, will visit the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall.

Adaptations, too, are faring well. Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, which sets the story in 20th-century rural Ireland, made its U.S. premiere at California’s San Jose Repertory Theatre in September. Around the same time, New York’s Bullet Space Theatre hosted Love, Medea, which fused Euripides and Seneca with excerpts from the post-partum journals of the lead actress. Bradford Louryk’s Klytaemnestra’s Unmentionables, which camped it up at New York’s Here Multi-Arts Center last December, included an impersonation of Medea, as well as of an overwrought Fury and other X-chromosome Greeks. Actors and Playwrights’ Initiative, in Kalamazoo, Mich., ushered the new year in with Neil LaBute’s bash: The Latterday Plays, which includes the monologue Medea Redux. New York’s Cx & Company gave a January airing to Heiner Müller’s 20-minute Medeamaterial. And looking ahead to next season, Seattle’s Northwest Asian American Theatre is planning to mount three reimaginings of the legend: Silas Jones’s American Medea: An African-American Tragedy, Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea and the futuristic tragedy wAve by Korean-American playwright Sung Rno.

Why the profusion of interest in Jason’s ex? The relatively recent forays of Diana Rigg (who won a Tony for her performance in Jonathan Kent’s 1994 production) and Isabelle Huppert (directed by Jacques Lassalle at the 2000 Avignon Festival) may share much of the blame. If such star turns have lent the play a little extra sex appeal, making it seem a more viable scheduling option, it is not surprising that actresses have been eager to sign on: With her confidence, self-awareness and supernatural prowess, Medea is the ne plus ultra of strong female characters—yet she suffers, too. "She is an empowered victimized person, as opposed to a disempowered victimized one," says Barnard College professor Helene Foley, author of Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2001). "And that makes her more interesting to do."

As for the play as a whole…Well, let’s get the obvious out of the way. The ancient Greeks are very modern—sometimes more modern than we are ourselves. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Greek tragedies, with their insights on guilt, the clashing of cultures and the legacy of violence, are more modern than ever before. Although most of these productions were scheduled before the terrorist attacks, many of the artists interviewed in the aftermath marveled at the play’s apparent topicality post-9/11.

For example, Ted Pappas, artistic director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, is quick to claim that Medea aces the audience-appeal test on narrative power alone. "We have Star Wars and Indiana Jones," he says. "The ancient Greeks had Jason and the Argonauts and Medea." Still, he admits that he was "amazed" by the response to his staging of Medea—the first Greek classic the Public had ever presented. Once the run began, on Sept. 27, he says, the actions of the title character (portrayed by Lisa Harrow) seemed to speak of "how one person’s rage can be so out of balance that it brings down an entire civilization." The show became "a magnetic event" for young people in particular—according to Pappas, audiences age 26 and under were responsible for 37 percent of single-ticket sales. The show bridged the gender gap, too: relieved male spectators tottered up to Pappas on several occasions, he says, to remark, "I had no idea this play was so short!" 

Certainly this "magnetic" episode in Pittsburgh exemplifies the timeless draw and eternal relevance of these ancient masterpieces. But the story of Medea has its own slightly creepy allure. Take it from a man who has demonstrated a healthy psychological distance from Greek-worship: John Fisher, whose campy Noises Off-style parody Medea: The Musical! won the 1999 Los Angeles Weekly award for best musical. The wronged bride from Colchis fascinates us more than other figures in the Greek canon, Fisher asserts, in part because we admire her moment of success: Medea lashes out at the man who hurt her, and then "she fucks up Jason’s whole patriarchal structure too, and then she flies away in her dragon-drawn chariot laughing maniacally. It’s like, yeah, that’s what you want to do when someone spurns you!" So, as despicable as her actions are, Fisher maintains, "People love this woman killing kids. They get a big kick out of it. It’s weird. Killing kids is not okay! Killing kids is never okay—but for some reason it’s okay for Medea. It’s an interesting audience phenomenon."

This audience phenomenon has manifested itself in different ways throughout history, as the intriguing volume Medea in Performance: 1500-2000 (Legenda, 2000) makes plain. A collection of papers delivered at a July 1998 conference organized by Oxford University’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the book delves into such subjects as the 18th-century British playwrights who excised deliberate infanticide from the Medea legend altogether ("Medea, as Euripides represents her, wou’d shock us….the murdering of her own Children, contrary to all the Dictates of Humanity and Mother-hood, " explained the preface to Charles Gildon’s Phaeton; or, the Fatal Divorce). Also covered are Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s use of kabuki and bunraku conventions in his famous Medea, first staged in 1978; and how Victorian burlesque Medeas related to the 19th-century debate on divorce legislation.

In her lucid and wide-ranging introduction to the volume, Oxford scholar Fiona Macintosh outlines several of the tropes that have surfaced repeatedly, over the course of the centuries, in theatrical, cinematic and operatic renderings of the murderous matriarch: Medea the Witch (a somber presence in Seneca’s 1st-century tragedy), Medea the Infanticide, Medea the Abandoned Wife and Medea the Proto-Feminist (an element, the introduction suggests, in Catulle Mendès’s 1898 heroine, famously incarnated by Sarah Bernhardt). Most interesting, in some ways, is the category of Medea the Outsider, which reflects the geopolitical aspects of the myth (the daughter of the king of Colchis, Medea is viewed as a "barbarian" by the Greeks, despite the fact that, in helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece, she has irrevocably exiled herself from her homeland). Macintosh detects these same patterns in such modern works as Robert Wilson’s 1970 Deafman Glance and in Guy Butler’s DEMEA, which was only performed in Butler’s native South Africa in 1990—three decades after he wrote it—because of the interracial love affair central to the plot.

It would be overreaching to suggest that the Medeas tuning up on America’s stages this season are sounding entirely new keys. Certainly, though, a number of them have essayed interesting contemporary variations on the motifs Macintosh identifies. The trio of iconoclastic adaptations slated for Northwest Asian American Theatre’s fall season take pot shots at Greek-myth clichés while relating Medea’s "outsider" status to the situation of minorities in America today. Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s artistic director and Medea actress Barbra Berlovitz detects in the play a moral relevant to modern-day relationship-management and international détente: "that if we don’t talk to each other, we end up killing our children either literally or figuratively, through war, aggression, terrorism."

Plays like Klytaemnestra’s Unmentionables and Love, Medea situate their protagonist’s hopes and frustrations in the context of a postfeminist era. And at the same time, the latter play, with its Seneca interpolations, links the image of Medea the Witch to the latest global conflicts. "If you look at what’s going on in the world, it’s a fight for power, for having your way of life rule," Love, Medea director/author Charles Schick commented last fall, as the U.S. rained bombs on Afghanistan. And he added, "I can’t think of a play that’s more relevant right now—I really can’t."

"You know my motto: all or nothing!" the title character quips to Jason in Charles Ludlam’s 12-page Medea, written in 1984. The notorious mother must have revised her maxim in the last two decades: If this year’s infanticide stagings share any quality, it’s a rejection of what one might call, to borrow a Wall Street term, "under-diversified" thinking. Artists who’ve worked on the recent Medeas cite a motley list of aims and thematic reference points, suggesting that assaulting the myth these days can mean covering a lot of wholly heterogeneous territory.

When he took on Euripides’ heroine, the Chamber Theatre’s artistic director, Montgomery Davis, chose the translation by poet Robinson Jeffers (famously a vehicle for Judith Anderson back in 1947). Jeffers, Davis says, "was very much a pacifist," and accordingly the Chamber production had "a kind of antiwar angle, in the sense of anti what men tend to do—shake their spears and push everyone around." Inspired by a postcard of Iranian women aiming guns on a firing range, Davis dressed his female characters in veils, suggesting that Corinth was "Western Europe on the edge of a Middle Eastern civilization." At the same time, though, the production’s terra cotta set—a walled patio and staircase—alluded to a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, making the production "very American, very Western," like Jeffers’s translation. Meanwhile, Davis’s lead actress, Angela Iannone, found a muse in Maria Callas—a legendary Medea in the ’50s in Luigi Cherubini’s opera as well as in the 1970 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Images of dangerous women, on the one hand, and culture clash, on the other, also motivated Ellen Geer’s performance as the lead in the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum’s production (Jeffers’s translation, again; Heidi Davis directed). For Geer, Medea is a problem play focused on "intolerance of foreign races and religion"—the Greek’s attitude toward the "barbarian" title character being Exhibit Number One. But Geer also gained perspective on her role from the 1994 case of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her children in a lake—the murder was "absolutely a part" of the concept behind the production, says Geer, whose performance the Los Angeles Times praised for "pain-racked howls coiling around the verse like a serpent." In the early years of this millennium, as it has through the centuries, the Medea narrative calls attention to fault lines in both the domestic and public worlds, inviting questions on the nature of individual and collective guilt, and on the boundary between reason and passion.

Real-life infanticide headlines bolstered another set of tried-and-true Medea themes—those relating to sexual identity and gender politics—in Bradford Louryk’s Klytaemnestra’s Unmentionables. Louryk, who credits Sartre and Charles Ludlam as inspirations for the show (whose text was compiled by Rob Grace), recalls that the case of Andrea Yates (the Houston woman arrested in 2001 for drowning her children in a bathtub) broke into the news while he was working on Unmentionables. He, his director Jennifer Wineman and his dramaturg Jess Applebaum all agreed, Louryk says, "that we couldn’t not incorporate this woman’s story into what we were doing—to make the play relevant and make Medea a real person." But the artists were also trying to fuse that image with "the archetype of the early ’60s housewife," including "the idea of Valium and being treated for psychotic episodes." The result was a Medea who staggered around the stage in an apron imprinted with a rhinestone-studded bloody handprint and wearing earrings shaped like little spoons: "So they make domestic sounds as she moves," Louryk explains. 

The frustrations caused by gender roles lent a far subtler subtext to the New York production Love, Medea, whose script sampled journals the lead actress had kept while pregnant with her daughter, Hannah. (Full family disclosure: Regina Bartkoff, who played Medea, is married to Charles Schick, who directed the show and performed the role of Jason; Hannah played a messenger. "If you can’t do Medea with your own daughter," Schick remarks, "Why do it with someone else’s?") In one moment of emotional climax, female chorus members carrying candles recited, "I, always a fighter against all forms of conformity…here I am in the greatest conventional role of all time." After a show, Bartkoff relates, some female spectators—searching perhaps to understand the mixed feelings associated with subordinating one’s own priorities to one’s children’s—requested copies of the text. "Maybe a lot of them were artists, too," muses Bartkoff, a painter as well as an actor, "trying to do five different things at once." And she adds: "One of the best things I ever did was have a child."

"I have always thought that Medea was an insult to all women—a woman who killed her own children to spite her ex-lover," says Silas Jones, whose American Medea: An African-American Tragedy will run at Northwest Asian American Theatre next season. In Jones’s opinion, "A lot of the Greek plays are long-winded, pretentious and rhetorical," and Euripides’ spell-casting child-killer is "one of the most heinous characters on the face of the earth." So he struck out at the offending classic with a Medea of his own—one so revisionist as to be barely recognizable. Set in the pre-revolutionary colonies, Jones’s tragedy features an African princess married to a white man from Greece, Jason. When the couple and their sons arrive on the Eastern Seaboard, she finds herself segregated in slave quarters. In the play’s hallucinatory conclusion, Jason’s skin turns dark and a monstrous Egyptian god seems to augur a dark age of capitalism. What’s missing is any infanticide—Medea’s son, in fact, stabs her. Jones says that, in writing the play, he was trying to comment on Eurocentric views of Africa—"The dark continent was dark because Medea helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece, the light of Africa, the cloak of knowledge," he asserts—as well as on race relations in the U.S. today.

His goals harmonize with those of Northwest’s artistic director Chay Yew, who has always been drawn to the theme of Medea the Outsider. "Because I’m Asian American, I see Medea as a play about immigration," Yew explains. "She’s an outsider who comes from a foreign country and tries to make it on her own. In that situation, there are forces in your identity that you give up. Medea gave up a lot to be in Greece." Having encountered both Jones’s play and Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where he is currently an associate artist and the director of the Asian Theatre Workshop, Yew determined to stage them once he assumed the artistic leadership of Northwest in 2000. He notes that stressing the "outsider" aspect of the Medea figure does not mean rejecting gender politics. "No one can ever take away the feminist tones of this play," he says.

Certainly antipatriarchal strains ring out from Moraga’s futuristic The Hungry Woman, whose lesbian heroine—a traditional healer—struggles to protect her teenage son amid the nightmarish chaos of a balkanized U.S. Pondering the myth, Moraga concluded that "there was a strong relationship between women’s enslavement and infanticide." In other words, Medea murders not because her no-goodnik husband spurns her, but, more broadly, because "in a society that doesn’t allow wholeness for women, perverted acts take place." But the playwright’s ideas about ethnic identity loom as large as feminism does in Hungry Woman, named for the supernatural being whose unappeasable appetite, according to Aztec mythology, brings the world into being. "We were told that, as gay people, we couldn’t be a part of the Chicano community," Moraga says, recalling her own experience as a lesbian coming of age in the early ’70s, "when the idea of Chicanos as a nation was very strong." Her play meditates on that specific experience of double alienation—sexual and ethnic—while broadening the scope toward more universal questions, such as "What we consider to be abnormal."

With Moraga’s and Jones’s scripts in his artistic reserves, Yew commissioned a third Medea—from Sung Rno, who was enthusiastic, having just seen Diana Rigg’s bout of Euripides on Broadway. But as Rno oriented himself to the material, the project began to seem more difficult—a quagmire of tempting clichés and too-easy parallels. At that point, he "took a step away" and attempted to "look at Medea more as a poem," he recalls. "I tried to think of it as a more open-ended idea—less sociological and more images and language. I came up with the idea of a wave—as in quantum physics—symbolizing the separation of cultures and Medea’s outsider status. That didn’t get into her being such a victim." Rno’s central character, M, mourns her losses amid a cyberpunk landscape representing (the script notes) "that peculiar state of mind that happens where Korea and America meet, somewhere between M*A*S*H* and Soon Yi." In this world, love and identity are as quixotic as the laws of subatomic particles.

In a curious way, Rno’s metaphor seems to relate to the quality Fiona Macintosh identifies as, perhaps, most fundamental to Medea’s charisma—a quality no doubt responsible for her brooding presence on America’s stages this year in productions as diverse as the Pittsburgh Public’s classic staging and Klytaemnestra’s Unmentionables. The revengeful mother, Macintosh writes in Medea in Performance, is "arguably the most theatrical of all Greek tragic characters." Reveling in the terrible persona she has crafted for herself, turning Jason and Creon into vulnerable audience members, and finally orchestrating her play’s finale—as, "performer…turned stage manager," in Macintosh’s phrasing—Medea is histrionic in all senses of the word. Looking at her, we see that, as light is both particle and wave, so she is both suffering woman (witch, abandoned wife, outsider) and actor—just as we all are, after all, since all selves are invented and performed.

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