Medea (review)

Industrial soundscape and a keening wail, the contemporary and the ancient, introduce the clash of cultures and genders in Deborah Warner's production of Euripides' Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Created at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2000, this satisfying production joins a plethora of recent Medeas, at the Classical Theater of Harlem, Milwaukee's Chamber Theatre, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater, among others. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, audiences seem drawn to one of the play'score themes, the idea that uncorked fury may be a rational response to political oppression and cultural isolation. Not that political allegory rigidly frames this deeply domestic play, instead, it sneaks in at the corners, erupting at its violent center.

In the ancient myths, the sorceress Medea, descendent of the Greek sun god Helios, murders her brother and destroys her father in order to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece. Euripides' play adds two elements: it makes Medea a foreigner, a barbarian from Colchis, and it makes her commit an infanticide. Given Euripides' subversive dramaturgy (he won only four or five prizes for his plays, compared to Aeschylus' thirteen and Sophocles' eighteen), his loathing of war (Medea was written in 431 BCE at the beginning of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars), and his own eventual self-exile, scholars have found justification in looking beyond a vengeful Medea to the violent patriarchy that exploits and humiliates her—Kreon, the Corinthian king who banishes her, and Jason who abandons her and their sons to marry Kreon's daughter.

Deborah Warner's production is situated on this revisionist terrain and makes shrewd contemporary connections. In Tom Pye's set design, Jason's home with Medea is an abandoned construction site that fills the playing space of BAM's Harvey Theater. Stacked slats covered in builder's plastic lie idle on the margins of the stage, cinderblocks for an uncompleted foundation are strewn everywhere, and at the center a coldly anonymous reflecting pool is surrounded by a gridwork that lets in light and voices from below. Transparent Plexiglas walls separate the upstage domestic interior from public space. More than a metaphor for the interrupted marriage of Jason and Medea, Pye's set invokes the smooth, hard lines of twenty-first century corporate power—the world of Kreon—in all its hostility to the messy spaces of women and children. Yet women and children inhabit this site, like weeds sprouting between paving stones. On each cinderblock is a well-used child's toy, a toy sailboat floats in the pool, and the chorus of Corinthian women, looking like they are on break from Wal-Mart, scurry over the angled clutter. In the course of the action, as Medea mangles the plans of royal succession, corporate gray, reflected in the central pool, is stained bright bloody red.

The chorus enters at a run, speaking rapidly in working-class Irish accents; they've come not to comfort but to ogle the notorious stranger in their midst. Fiona Shaw's Medea gives them more than they bargained for. In a dowdy summer dress, sneakers, and tracksuit jacket, wearing large sunglasses and a photo-ready smile, Shaw saunters on slowly like a hungry cat timing her strike. And yet, of a piece with this coiled fury, is Shaw's haggard searching face. Utterly porous to all emotion, including clownish self-deprecation, Shaw's magnificent Medea takes us on a psychic journey of confusion and invention that makes "tragic inevitability" a tactile, frightening, profoundly intersubjective experience.

Deborah Warner understands the human face of violence better than any director working today. This Medea recalls her prize-winning Titus Andronicus, at which spectators routinely fainted, not because of the gore, but because in Warner's stagings the audience is always emotionally wrong-footed. Mayhem erupts not as a conclusion to anger but rather within a space of instinctive touch, of homey family embrace. In moments of spitting rage, Medea and...