Theatre in Review: Medea Re-Versed (Red Bull Theater and Bedlam at The Sheen Center)The play is titled Medea Re-Versed but the evening is stolen by the Messenger, the supporting character who brings the dire news of murder most foul. The production's chief utility player, the great Jacob Ming-Trent, handles multiple roles here, including Creon, King of Corinth, who intends to marry off Jason, Medea's husband, to his daughter (Glauce in most versions but nameless here), and Aegeus, King of Athens, who offers Medea a haven in exchange for help with his fertility issues. (Medea, you will recall, supported Jason in his adventures, going so far as to tranquilize a dragon while he searched for the golden fleece. Now he is about to toss her aside for a younger, better-connected woman, antiquity's first trophy wife.) Ming-Trent is solid in both roles -- as much as the current text will allow -- but for an actor, there's no opportunity like delivering bad news: The Messenger reveals, with chilling precision, how Medea eliminated her rival with the gift of a poisoned gown, unleashing chaos at the wedding feast. Trying to save her, Creon succumbs as well, reduced to ashes by Medea's rageful cunning. The playwright, Luis Quintero, does Euripides' one better, turning the deaths of Creon and Glauce into cases of spontaneous combustion, their skin melting off their bones. The writing is exceptionally vivid and Ming-Trent's delivery vibrates with the terror of an event that, once experienced, can never be unseen. As the climax unfolds, the concept of a modern, street-language retelling of this towering tragedy comes into sharp relief. To be fair, the idea of Medea as a "hip-hopera" isn't entirely off-base. Euripides' play is structured as a series of one-on-one confrontations that Quintero converts into rap battles. Medea is, in many ways, the most contemporary of the Greek heroines, and her greatest crime, the murder of her children, has a kind of tabloid tang. (One can envision her as the subject of an HLN series titled Women Scorned.) Quintero has conceived Medea Re-Versed as a self-conscious theatrical event, complete with audience participation that nods to the ritualistic nature of Greek theatre. Interesting attempts have been made to reframe ancient theatrical conventions in today's terms. Emmie Finckel's thrust stage, designed for audience engagement, features a beatboxer, a guitarist, and a bass player. (If the production has a hip-hop beat, the uncredited musical interludes trend toward alternative metal.) The role of the Nurse has been eliminated, but the Chorus Leader, also known as the Emcee (played by Quintero), presides as a kind of narrator. In practice, however, the production suffers from very 2024 problems. If you attend Medea Re-Versed, you might want to bone up on the material in advance because the prologue, delivered by Quintero, is largely inaudible, robbing the audience of the all-important backstory. The actor's use of a handheld mic renders his voice hollow and distant; the music's bassline has a way of drowning him out. The action begins in confusion and takes far too long to recover. More fundamentally, the play's language -- ornate wordplay, filled with intricate almost-rhymes --- has the regrettable effect of cutting the characters down to size. The tone is snappy and wisecracking, the antithesis of tragedy; this is hardly the right buildup to a monstrous finale. Speaking of Jason and Glauce, Medea, sounding like a Real Housewife of Corinth, rails, 'He got his freak on with Creon's wee spawn/And in a couple weeks/She'll be a teen mom." Jason, showing up wrapped in fleece (the costumes are by Nicole Wee), announces, "Hey Babe it's me/It's your Babe's Pops/I know this fable of ours/Ain't an Aesop/But babe stop/I don't want this to be how they pictures us/On clay pots." The author is so fond of one speech by Creon, he uses it three times: "When I first met you/I offered you a pomegranate/But then you went and took my palms for granted/So I slapped your sentence on a stone/So you could take my palms for granite." And sometimes the drama is overridden by cutesy bits like this: Medea: Never mind Aegeus/What brought you here? Ageus: An appointment with the seer. Meadea: Well, did you see her? Ageus: I want to see her and she seared me. Medea: Seriously.
Seriously, at this point, we've departed the world of Euripides tragedy and entered the burlesque stage of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This is less a fresh interpretation of a classic drama than a case of a text bent, awkwardly, to fit a contemporary style. To keep things current, the text makes fleeting references to issues like immigration, sexual consent, and female agency, but none are given much consideration. The direction by Nathan Winkelstein (who co-conceived the project with Quintero) is strong and clear, but the performances are subordinate to the script's trash-talking tone. Also, Medea is a surprisingly bland and one-dimensional character. The role is open to many interpretations: Zoe Caldwell gave her a furious sexual energy. Diana Rigg was a haut-bourgeois matron appalled at the little people surrounding her. Fiona Shaw's Medea had suffered a psychotic break that left her giggling at a grief-stricken Jason, playfully splashing him with water. Sarin Monae West gives the character considerable dignity but little more than that; you wouldn't know that her Medea had joined Jason in wild adventures, is skilled in supernatural practices, and thirsts for vengeance. (How ruthless is she? She has murdered and dismembered her brother, acts for which she shows no regret. And, of course, her children are not long for this world.) Here, writing, direction, and acting reduce her to a pillar of victimized womanhood, surely the least interesting choice. Nevertheless, once Ming-Trent, as the Messenger, has delivered news of the slaughter unfolding offstage, the production undergoes a sea change and a true sense of horror creeps in. West's self-possession cracks and we finally see what the murder of her children will cost her. Stephen Michael Spencer's strutting, self-assured Jason is driven to a terrifying brink by the sight of his wife's blood-drenched arms. If tragedy is running late, it finally arrives, delivering a hard, swift slap. Still, this is an evening of mixed blessings. Cha See's lighting shifts fluently between stark white washes for the dramatic scenes and a battery of techniques -- saturated colors, ballyhoos, and blinder cues for the musical sequences. But Matt Otto, a perfectly good sound designer, has been encouraged to crank up the volume to sometimes unbearable heights. And the production never settles on a consistent tone. One leaves Medea Re-Versed on a high that only great tragedy can generate but, for most of its running time, it doesn't know where it's coming from: Epidaurus or an episode of Drop the Mic. As Medea tells, Jason, "I'll say it like it is/You've been a dick." Now, that's telling him. --David Barbour 
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