More thoughts on Medea

Last night I came home to an unusual comment on my recent review of Medea at the Actors' Shakespeare Project. Here it is in full:

I have just seen the performance of Mrs Israel. Well I liked it. It was kind of a modern Medea : a Medea that transforms her passion which should normally be viewed as something very shamful (it's an understatment), to something very intellectual and logic. We are all reassured by these "scientific" almost and very eloquent arguments. Could the spectator not see the children , we would willingly believe that Medea's murder is no more than a kind of abortion... oh sorry I must have hurt the pro choice people. Medea is a very modern woman.

What leapt out at me was the mention of abortion - along with the grammatical and spelling misfires (which often signal that something has been typed in passion, as I myself can attest).  It's rare that anyone mentions abortion at all in the theatrical sphere, of course - there's a kind of cultural lacuna in operation around it - and even rarer that someone should criticize abortion rights (at least implicitly).

But I was also jarred by the fact that I had simply edited out of my own consciousness, while writing my review, the fact that Ms. Israel was also the first visibly pregnant Medea I'd ever seen.  Without even realizing it, I had turned a blind eye to what seems to have been the salient artistic statement of the production for my commenter.  And which of course puts a destabilizing spin on the idea of a "modern" Medea.  To my commenter, I'd guess, Medea wasn't unusual at all; he (probably, but perhaps she) may feel that this child-killing character is the new female norm.

But before I thought about that, I realized I had to interrogate myself; why had I "forgotten" that Ms. Israel was visibly pregnant as she mused about killing children?  There's one easy explanation - to put it awkwardly, I realized I had assumed that her pregnancy wasn't part of the "planned" show.  (I know, it's rude to speculate on these kinds of questions, but I'm afraid right now I have to.)  And I'm used by now to seeing female artists, particularly musicians and singers, perform while expecting.

Still, I'd also put out of my mind the fact that Ms. Israel sometimes stroked her "baby bump" during her performance - she seemed to be consciously putting her own condition into artistic play; Medea was musing on her own pregnancy, not Ms. Israel's.  But again, I'd ignored that - probably because I just couldn't understand how the actress's condition could be brought into artistic play without raising all sorts of ugly political arguments with which I disagree.  I really wish she hadn't done that.

But she did do it, so you see the problem.  If I'm opposed in general to the practice of replacing theatrical art with liberal propaganda, what's my reason for ignoring these aspects of this production?  I'm afraid I can't really come up with one.  I may disagree with my commenter politically, but I have to admit - he or she has a point, there's a disturbing, if perhaps unintentionally invoked, political dimension at the center of this version that has been clumsily half-disguised (and half-declared).  To be blunt, if the production had been self-consistent, it would have ended with Medea at least attempting an abortion at its climax, after killing her other children.  Why would she not?  Why would she drive off in her dragon-drawn chariot with two dead babies, but a live one on the way?  I suppose you could posit that Jason might not be the father of the child she's expecting - but that kind of undermines her righteous fury at his own faithlessness, doesn't it; if she herself has been unfaithful, then in some ways she's even more horrifying than she is already.

I have to confess I think it might be an interesting, if potentially blood-curdling, experiment to see whether Euripides' text is actually tenable in an explicitly pro-abortion political environment.  Perhaps there's even some theatre company out there that is gonzo enough to try that; but I think it would throw into weird relief the proto-feminist stance that some people - including the Globe's Don Aucoin, who wrote about the production in the Sunday edition - have been reading into this Medea.  I know, I know, Aucoin is just trying to make hay out of the current Republican wing-nuttery over contraception, which I, like every right-thinking person, of course oppose.

Still, if we begin to think of Medea as a feminist symbol, does that mean we're okay with viewing children - born or unborn - as simply collateral damage in the war between the sexes?  Does sexist oppression really grant a mother some sort of implicit sympathy in the killing of her child?  I think Euripides says no.  But I think Israel, her director, and the Actors' Shakespeare Project are saying yes.  Or at least they're half saying yes.  Whether that's an honest approach or not I leave up to you.

Medea, Actors' Shakespeare Project

The heroine of Euripides' Medea is half martyr, and half murderess - and not just any murderess, but a killer of her own children. This makes her - special, shall we say.  But these days we like to dwell on the first of her personae, while only half-acknowledging the second.  Which may be understandable given our current theatrical politics - we have trouble gazing directly upon women capable of filicide, and resist even the suggestion that we could grant one our theatrical sympathy; but in the end I'm afraid this basically emasculates (sorry) Medea as tragedy.

Which may be why the new staging by the Actors' Shakespeare Project feels simultaneously ferocious and somehow unfocused.  The actors give it their all, and so there's always one kind of intensity on offer.  But it's a vague, misdirected intensity - it seems to have been imported from some other play - largely because in the title role, Jennie Israel is all martyr, and no murderess - even though she does off her kids in a splashily gory manner.  Too bad we can still see. despite all the stage blood, that she has closed herself off from the act internally, and is unable to allow herself to experience her crime as the "triumph" it is.

This is probably a compliment to Ms. Israel, of course; for the actress who successfully limns Medea must find her way to, and back from, emotional places it's generally ill-advised to contemplate or speak of, much less experience.  Not that she's a mystery; indeed, perhaps we understand her all too well.  The character has certainly been wronged by her husband Jason - for whom Medea gave up literally everything in her former life, but who now has abandoned her for a younger wife.  So she has our sympathy, and there's a clear way for an actress to enter her frame of mind - until she begins to plan her revenge.  For Medea is bent not on wounding her betrayer himself, but instead in triumphing over him, "destroying" him figuratively - in winning, and being seen to have won; and thus she plots the deaths of those around her former hero, including, yes, her own children by him.

Such a choice means Medea has to be more than a little crazy - or rather demonic, in the old sense of the word; she's a witch, after all, and makes her final exit in a chariot drawn by dragons; she's in touch with literally supernatural forces of passionate ego. And perhaps it's worth mentioning that in earlier myths, Medea is a murderess several times over before Euripides picks up her story (she even killed her own brother, in some accounts, for Jason's sake).

Photos: Stratton McCrady

So Medea is bad news, and this makes her in many ways a problematic tragic heroine.  She doesn't even die at the end of her "tragedy" - instead, she gets away with a horrific crime.  So it's no surprise I've only seen the play work as tragedy one time - and that was when the actress devoted herself to her own horror at what she knew she was capable of, indeed was even planning.  This gave the script a remorseless momentum - and tellingly, at the finale, in her triumph over her faithless husband, this Medea seemed to be literally out of her mind.  Her own personality had driven itself over the edge; in a way she had died.

But none of this kind of intensity is forthcoming, I'm afraid, at Actors' Shakespeare Project, which under the stylized direction of David R. Gammons is something of a conceptual muddle - even if it looks terrific.  The set is a house straight out of Leave it to Beaver (it even splits apart on cue), but the chorus seems to have wandered in from a Stevie Nicks concert; meanwhile Medea mopes around in mourning (at left), while her husband is dressed for his wedding.  And did I mention the blinking chandelier?  There's a justification for all these choices, actually, but somehow these variegated visual gambits never seem to cohere.  And it doesn't help that director Gammons - who was a designer before he became a director - tends to resort to dumb show to put over what the actors should be conveying in their performances.  (When Jason first appears, for instance, he and Medea do an awkward roll in the hay to communicate that there's still sexual tension between them.)

There are good moments in several of the performances - including Israel's - but perhaps only Joel Colodner's amusing turn as Aegeus really comes together (Nigel Gore does his best as the smarmily calculating Jason, but he's miscast; he's simply not slick enough).  But I don't really expect a Gammons cast to do their best work, I'm afraid - at least not in a piece as thorny as Medea. This director is always busy around town, I know, but behind the visual flash of his productions, I too often feel a dramatic void. I know for a lot of people the flash is enough; I'm just not one of them.