Theatre in Review: Munich Medea: Happy Family (PlayCo/WP Theater)

	Heather Raffo. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

We've all encountered stories of sexual abuse, both in fact and fiction, but few are as bizarre or disturbing as the triangle that makes up Munich Medea: Happy Family. In her first effort, the playwright Corinne Jaber adopts the tripartite testimony model employed by Brian Friel in Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney, using interlocking monologues to let each character have his or her say about their uniquely awful situation and its enduring consequences.

We begin with Caroline, daughter of a well-known actor and his reclusive wife; hers is a lonely existence thanks to parents utterly absorbed in themselves only -- until she befriends Alice, a new student at her school. Alice, the daughter of two very different refugees -- a father who "had hitchhiked from Syria" and a mother raised in communist East Germany -- is similarly eager to escape her unhappy home. The eleven-year-old girls -- they're younger than their classmates, having both skipped a grade -- quickly bond, forming a sustaining friendship until they are sixteen and Alice abruptly breaks it off.

The separation occurs because Alice is sleeping with Caroline's father. Unbeknownst to her, Caroline is well-apprised of the situation. As she recalls, her dad "had told me/Crawled into my bed one night/Like he would do/His way to be with me/Of saying good night/And confided in me as if I were a wife to whom he was confessing/As if he was playing one of his parts/He said he was in love/And lost/Whimpering/I almost laughed/But I knew he had done it/Stolen my friend."

If that passage gives you the willies, hold on tight, for Munich Medea: Happy Family is filled with uglier, more clinical revelations. Alice is courted by Father (as he is known in the script), who uses his considerable charm to lure her into an emotional attachment that paves the way for sordid sexual trysts. Dispassionately noting the details of their first time together -- a nearly empty, borrowed room; "a mattress on the floor with used sheets," Vaseline for a lubricant -- Alice adds, "It hurt so much/I screamed/He closed my mouth." His response to her cries? "Oh, my child, don't wake the neighbors, they'll be jealous." Father, such a good actor that he even (occasionally) believes in his attacks of conscience, asks, "My girl, my girl/Am I taking you into the world too rapidly?/Am I robbing you of your innocence too soon?" He quickly turns defensive, however, furiously demanding of us, "Do you ask for consent every time you fuck?"

Jaber is not afraid to introduce contradictory evidence that, without altering the situation's fundamentally immoral framework, adds subtle shadings to the traditional roles of predator and victim. "Can you understand my attraction to the charming vulgar middle-aged actor?" Alice wonders. "Who lifted the veils of decency and the acceptable? Who moved boundaries? Who took me to Wonderland where everything was possible/Where there were no limits apart from those you create?" For her part, Caroline admits that Father "could be fun," almost daring us to judge her for saying so. In an especially bitter irony, Caroline is relieved to hear of Alice and Father's liaison for reasons that are hinted at but not revealed until near the end, cuing a family reunion to end them all.

A brief and furiously intense experience, Munich Medea is compromised in part by Lee Sunday Evans' stilted direction and Crystal Finn's performance as Caroline, which often feels rushed and lacking in nuance. Overall, there are too many declamatory passages and pregnant pauses when an intimate, confiding tone would have more impact; the production often seems determined to announce its importance, an unnecessary tactic when the words are as scalding as these. The script also gets a bit squishy when the affair comes to light and Father and Alice are separated by court order. The absence of consequences for Father is hard to credit. It's not entirely surprising that he isn't subject to prosecution because the age of consent in Germany is fourteen. But his apparent escape from career-damaging scandal is surely worth a comment or two, if only to highlight his position of power.

Still, there's the strange look of triumph in Heather Raffo's eyes as Alice, after considerable hesitations, says, "rape," finally putting a name to the crime committed against her. Kurt Rhoads' Father is a most formidable monster, whether displaying his glib professional mastery of an array of emotions, lashing out in fury at Alice for not taking suitable protection, or making a final appearance to complain about the ravages of age, still no closer to grasping the havoc he has caused.

Kristen Robinson's scenic design combines a starkly unfurnished stage with a fully appointed dressing room on a second level, adjoined by another room glimpsed only through a tiny window. It's an odd setup but Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew's lighting and the sound design by Daniela Hart and Uptown Works add sinister notes of their own. Dina El-Aziz's costumes ably contrast Caroline and Alice, who have followed very different life paths.

And, as Munich Medea makes clear, a few decades of silence and thousands of miles are not enough to keep Caroline and Alice from feeling inextricably linked by the events of their youth. This isn't an elegant work, but its brutal honesty is its best defense. Sexual abuse is an appalling crime; staying silent about it only compounds its evil. --David Barbour