Murder by Timidity: BAM's Next Wave and Classic Revivals

Euripides, Medea, The Abbey Theatre, director: Deborah Warner; William Shakespeare, Macbeth, The Ninagawa Company, director: Yukio Ninagawa. Both presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fall 2002.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival celebrated its twentieth year this season with two classical revivals conspicuous among its theatre offerings. Anchoring the festival were glitzy, large scale productions of Euripides' Medea and Shakespeare's Macbeth by prominent directors affiliated with major theatre outfits: Deborah Warner's Medea, from Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, and Yukio Ninagawa's Macbeth, developed in his own Ninagawa Company in Japan. Both directors delivered sensational renditions of creepy old standards, but beneath a polished veneer of competence, these productions were strangely hollow and safe. A hallmark of innovative theatre is the ability to re-open classic plays and render them in creative and original ways, but these versions of Medea and Macbeth lacked the real boldness or fresh vision one hopes for from Next Wave. Improbable as it might seem considering their content, both of these murderous plays were presented as calculated crowd pleasers, leaving the impression that as Next Wave turns twenty, BAM is intent on cultivating an audience for increasingly conventional theatre. If these productions represent a "next wave" of classic revivals, the term itself is in need of an overhaul.

Fundamentally, both productions failed to engage or even acknowledge an audience in any substantive way, and hence feared rather than embraced their own theatricality. Or, perhaps a better way of putting it would be that both productions defined theatricality as spectacle alone, with little sense of how to put spectacle in dialogue with ideas. Warner and Ninagawa more often than not cited familiar conventions of mainstream film and television to produce a flat viewing experience in which the rich visuals and technical acumen of the productions substituted for intellectual inquiry. They each relied on the "prestige" of the plays to justify interest, and the plays' dark subject matter to provide some kick. But the mere fact that the content of a play like Medea, and to a lesser extent Macbeth, is risqué does not ensure that productions of them are necessarily edgy. Both of these productions, in distinct but related ways, lacked a real commitment to using theatre as a means to explore the taboos and difficult ethical questions the plays raise.

Staged in BAM's beautifully dilapidated Harvey Theatre, Warner's Medea squandered the immense theatricality of its space. There are fairly well established conventions in mainstream film and television for depicting frenzy giving way to tragedy, from innumerable cop and crime shows to serial killer-themed movies, and these were the conventions through which Warner sought to work, reaching for uncritical affect in the face of a horrific tale. Warner's highly acclaimed production offered accessible performances but little insight into the play's dark and unsettling depiction of a boundless fury that culminates in infanticide. Scorned by her lover Jason, whom she had aided in capturing the Golden Fleece through her magic and machinations, Medea kills their children in a rage against the injustices done to her. Medea, to say the least, isa challenging story, thick with political, social, and sexual complications. Warner attempted to re-imagine Medea by elucidating Euripides' version of the Greek myth as modern domestic tragedy. If one wanted a theatrical analogue, the general tone of the production, including the highly naturalistic, method-acting style, evoked Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, with perhaps a touch of Sam Shepard.

This Medea was the story of a family unit in crisis, a desperate and soon to be mortally abusive mother lamenting her children's absent father. But the real context for the production, as I've been suggesting, was less twentieth-century theatre than contemporary film and television melodrama. The set and costumes suggested the location of the action to be the patio...