Medea and Jason have changed their names to Anna and Lucas. Simon Stone’s stimulating adaptation of
Euripides’ familiar classic is titled Medea
and it clearly follows the plot line so closely that nobody can be surprised by
the outcome. Anna is a pharmaceuticals researcher. Lucas is attracted to the much
younger daughter of his own boss — Clara's name is a fine translation of Euripides' Glauke, and
Christopher here is the new name for her father, Creon.
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| Marieke Heebink plays the lead in Simon Stone's Medea at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg thru March 7. |
A fortunate airline misfortune stranded me in Amsterdam for
a choice opportunity to see this new adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. Open seating allowed me to arrive
a few minutes before curtain and still get the best single seat in the house,
precise center of row 5. The box office clerk asked
whether I would be OK with a play in Dutch. Since I have read Euripides’ play
few times, I felt confident that I would be able to follow it. And I am glad I
took the chance. The Stadsschouwburg
will feature the Toneelgroepamsterdam through the middle of March in this
extraordinarily provocative production.
The boys have personalities. They are personalized with
names, even. Stagecrafting in this production puts the boys on the empty stage
for at least 10 minutes before the play starts. One plays on his laptop,
as the other clad in a hoodie leans idly against a wall. This dramaturgical
gesture shifts the focus of the tragedy more from Medea’s solitary plight to
her murder of the children themselves. During the play, the boys’ pranks
involve catching Mom and Dad in bed, offstage but with video camera rolling. Mom’s
far more amused than Dad to be caught in flagrante with his estranged wife. And the prank becomes a critical plot element far beyond
what Euripides conceived. The kids interact with their future stepmother both
before and during the delivery of Medea’s auspicious gift. Anna/Medea has been slipping into an alcoholic emotional abyss since it was clear she would not regain her husband's heart. Here, too, Stone’s
script probes new depths that Euripides overlooked.
Stone has plied rather deftly his adaptor’s tool in this
new play. Rather than opening with the original’s ominous fears of the Nurse —
“Would that the Argo had never penetrated the Symplegades…” The play opens with Anna and Lucas in dialogue softly and face-to-face, but separated by at least 20 feet. Later, the
nurse's role will be filled by a social worker who comes in on assignment to supervise
Anna’s increasingly frightening activities. Anna is a 40-something mother whose
self-confidence is clearly shattered by her husband’s pursuit of a girl with
long legs and a powerful father. Euripides' Jason had harbored similar motives, of course, but the circumstances are naturally modernized.
The only mythological allusion I caught was an overt reference to Ovid's Philomela and Itys, with citation overtly pointed out within the text of the Metamorphoses. Anachronism such as this cannot stall pedants who want to enjoy this 21st-century adaptation, for it can't matter that Euripides' 5th-century masterpiece is explained by way of a Roman narrative. Can it?
Some technological razzmattaz draws the audience into the
most intimate proximity to the actors on stage. A large screen above the stage
displays projected images from a wide variety of angles throughout. When the
estranged couple explicates their rift in the opening scene, an offstage camera
zooms in on Medea’s face then Jason’s, and the audience can simultaneously see their
distance and fading lustre of Medea’s hair, the crows feet in her saddened
eyes. A stunning shot late in the play gazes down directly down, 90-degrees
from the rafters high above the stage in one of the most etherial views. Is the
director showing us the vantage point of Medea’s divine grandfather, the only
savior for this horrific mother?
Simon Stone’s play is not especially preachy. And in its
most chilling moments Medea’s unthinkable crime becomes somehow plausible. The
program notes chronicle briefly the horrific parricide of the Kansas physician
Debora Green who in 1995 began poisoning her estranged husband, Michael Farrar,
and then burned down the family home killing two of their three children. The
sensationalism of Green’s murder is the subject of Ann Rule’s book Bitter Harvest: a woman’s fury, a mother’s sacrifice (2014). Mrs. Green is
serving two consecutive 40-year death sentences incarcerated in federal
penitentiary. While Ann Rule’s reviewers compare Green to Medea more readily than
the author herself seems to, clearly Simon Stone has knitted a mythological layer over the top of Rule’s recent NYT Bestseller.
Stone produces the plot with a good deal of verve. The
play’s second half is physically dominated by ash. The first phases bring a
contstant falling column of black ash that falls into a heap in the middle of
the stage, thematically visualizing the ruins of Medea’s ruined marriage. Then,
when the rift is final and there is no going back, the column stops but the ash
heap comes into play. It is tampled. It is scattered. The actors frollick
through it and grieve in it and grovel in the most telling ways. A stark-white
set that is otherwise utterly void of props becomes a gutwrenching backdrop to
the blackened ash of a once smoldering love affair.
—— RTM
For the toneelgroepamsterdam website: http://www.tga.nl/en/productions/medea (click)
For Simon Stone:
This same play is opening at Brooklyn's BAM in January 2020.
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