The Third Wheel

Hard to say, then, how much of the production’s clear win with its audience was due to an ultra-contemporary acting style that pushes “accessibility” with the subtlety of a falling piano. We are informed shortly after the lights go up that this is Not Your Father’s Medea as a designer-jeaned chorus member declares the plight of the heroine with stammering hysteria worthy the Acting Studio c. 1960. Right before Medea’s entrance, another chorus member holds a pantomimed mike to her lips and delivers a couple of her lines as a passionate snatch of R&B. When Medea herself comes on, her line “Hello, ladies of Corinth. It is I,” is heard as “What are you staring at? It’s me. Duh.” After Jason enters to demand Medea hand over the children, he sighs and slaps his faded-denim-covered thighs virtually every time her mouth opens in the manner of a sitcom lunch-pail dad having a marital tiff. Lines are unceasingly halted mid-phrase to indicate uncertainty and disgust (What do you. [Hands flail.] Intend to do to me those boys are mine!), or muttered as throwaways to indicate sarcasm (accounting for much of the laughter – like most seasoned actors, Shaw knows how to be funny at the expense of a line’s inherent power).

The premise of this and innumerable other productions of contemporized classics is that old plays need the dust blown off them, that they need an injection of new life to keep them relevant and accessible. I mostly agree with this. But this also requires resuscitation of those elements that give a play the enduring quality of a classic. I don’t read Greek, but Euripides’ verse has to be good for something. The anxiety of the BAM/Abbey Theatre Medea (and the “translation” it uses) is that heightened speech will alienate audiences, and hence needs to be vulgarized or delivered at a spitfire pace to save it from itself. But the elevated quality of Euripides’ speech is precisely what makes Medea’s bizarre and extreme plot bearable to watch. Its spoken poetry not only entices the ear, it prepares us to enter a realm where lust, jealousy and despair will follow an unrelenting trajectory into betrayal, murder, and infanticide. It prepares us for a realm where the extreme is routine – and purposefully so. The mission of tragedy is not merely to shock and titillate, but to enable a viewing of emotionally devastating events through a structure that counter-balances them. To obscure or ignore the heightened speech and staging which comprise that necessary structure is to leave an audience with something unfocused, indulgent, and less emotionally penetrating.

Director Warner seems to know this. The tone changes completely in the critical climactic scenes. The messenger who recounts the murder of Jason’s new bride brings a snowballing dread to his tale by giving weight and shape to every word. The chorus, anticipating a mother’s slaying of her young sons, keens accordingly as an ominous chord swells and one of them performs an exorcism dance. And the actual climax, while occurring offstage, is alluded to with a sudden sleight-of-hand whose terrifying, heartbreaking impact is a triumph of ingenious stagecraft. (It has to be seen to be believed.)

The Abbey Theatre’s international success with Medea is therefore a mixed blessing. The power of its most crucial scenes makes for indispensable theatergoing. Its path-of-least-resistance approach to the remaining play may nonetheless send yet another signal to producers that classics cannot reach a sizeable audience without pandering to the laziest of sensibilities.