Robert Montera’s spring semester students were charmed to find the curriculum coming to life across the boroughs; a modern adaptation of Euripides’ ancient tragedy Medea played at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. These circumstances were agreeably uncanny as students had just begun the famed Greek tragedy as it opened at BAM. Australian playwright Simon Stone’s reworking of Medea starred high profile and talented real-life couple Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, who helped to make it a hot winter ticket in New York.
Stone has augmented his classical source with inspiration drawn from the real-life case of Debora Green, a Kansas City doctor who murdered two of her children in 1995 while in the midst of a quarrelsome divorce. Byrne plays the Medea character, Anna, a soused in wine research scientist who has just been released from a mental institution after trying to poison her husband, Lucas (Cannavale). Lucas, childish and social climbing, leaves Anna for a younger woman (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of his powerful boss (Dylan Baker), and the two boys are caught in the crossfire.
At the beginning of Stone’s Medea, Anna has just gotten out of a mental institution. Lucas, aloof, picks her up with uncomfortable tensions growing as they spend time at the family house with her and their technology loving children, Edgar and Gus. We soon learn the origins of this poisoning as “sexts” with Clara (Weinstein), the boss’s daughter who Lucas is having an affair with, are uncovered on his phone. After, Anna just does what any woman would: she slowly doses him with poisonous ricin in his dinner every night to keep him close and get revenge. Ultimately, Lucas survives, divorces Anna, gets custody of the children and has plans now to marry and impregnate Clara. However, because this is Medea after all, these plans will go awry, and Edgar and Gus’s eternally infamous mother will get the revenge on those around her that they so rightfully deserve.
For this production, Bob Cousin’s set is a shining white box with large video screens, which make the play both contemporary and allegorical at once. As the show begins, a huge one lifts up, hanging like a billboard over the stage. We often see projections here starting out with steady close-ups of Anna’s face and then live action shots filmed by the children for their school documentary project. The rest of the stage is absolutely edgeless, blurring the space into a seamless white void. Stone’s multi media approach makes for a fascinating dimension to the complex psychological case study that becomes Anna’s story (like Medea’s).
With the screens, audiences never miss her mouth drawn up into a cavernous smile or her sweet tone of voice mismatching her wild eyed face. The multi media approach working in tandem with the minimalist stage design gives elements in this play much more of an established personality than our commonplace proscenium would. Towards the end, black ashes sift down from the ceiling, representing the chilling emblem of the complete destruction of a family. With these ashes and the blood of those around Anna, the once dramatically vestal white stage is no more.
Conclusively, the stage and its pristine whiteness serve their purpose as a conception of immaculacy waiting to be defiled. The physical and emotional aspects of Stone’s creation add to the intensity of Medea’s inescapable end. Stone’s adaptation is a rich addition to the previous array of productions, most of which focus either on women’s oppression in some form or on Medea’s role as an outsider fighting against the elite. He is able to place in proximity Euripides’ classical motifs alongside his own objective portrayal of not just the horrors one woman will commit, but how society has forced her to commit them.
Fieldston students taking Montera’s “Ancient Greeks and Their Rivals” elective this spring took advantage of this production to see the Euripidean play they had just studied performed live, and they offered some insightful commentary and observations on Stone’s take.
“The juxtaposition of the original text and the modernization of Stone’s version was truly able to make for a deeper understanding of what Euripides was trying to convey for me,” Maia Handwerker (VI) says. “Stone’s obviously astute grasp of Euripides shines right through the writing.”
“I thought the death in the end was a lot more peaceful than it came off in the original text,” Anya Dubner (VI) says. “This came as a shock to me as it wasn’t quite the dramatic punch or shock factor as when Medea flees the scene originally in her dragon pulled chariot after murdering a king, princess and her own two children. Although Medea’s death in the end may not have been as dramatic as the original, I believe there was power within the peacefulness of it. I thought, aside from the other modern motifs conveyed, the play overall was a soft commentary on today’s opioid epidemic. How it causes so much death and pain in the world in a discrete way that not enough people pay attention to. There were definitely some stark contrasts between Euripides and BAM’s interpretation, and one that stood out to me the most was the way her love towards the children was executed. At BAM, there was a more personable closeness to the children, and their relationship was able to be truly fostered. This contrasted Euripides where it felt like she despised him the whole time, and the emotional distress made it hard to show love.”
The serendipity of Stone’s production at BAM facilitated a wonderful opportunity for students to see curriculum enkindled in the real world, and for those lucky enough to have seen it, it was a real delight.
