Medea in Negative
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage MEDEA IN NEGATIVE BY ALBERT BERMEL At the previous Circle in the Square on Bleecker Street, where Michael Cacoyannis once contrived bloodless versions of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia...
...These represent the moon, possibly an allusion to Hecate who, among her many aspects, is a moon goddess...
...This she could do by dying, but suicide is not a choice the playwright offers -her: Medea is compelled to commit the wrong crime and add to her miseries by living with it...
...But her act cannot begin to answer her needs...
...According to Greek mythology Medea was a sorceress, a bitch-princess whose slaying of her two children represents merely one more atrocity in a murderous career...
...The setting by Robert Mitchell has steps that, instead of rising to an oblong skene with Medea's house perched on it, drop into a pit...
...Medea is a very;special woman,, yet she believes her condition is that of all women...
...the infants' deaths then become less her loss than Jason's, and the play is his tragedy, not hers...
...They are really singing, not simply reciting or chanting, and Michael Small's music, as well as the "electronic environment" (a bumptious name for incidental sounds credited to someone or something called Tempi) have the effect of enhancing the music of the dialogue...
...Thus the drama opens with a harshly "negative overturn" (to borrow Anne Pippin Burnett's term), establishing a tone of defiance and conflict for the events that are to come...
...At one point Medea says something like, "Tell me, Jason, where do I go from here...
...From this perspective, Medea has to be played as a woman the audience cannot easily condemn, and Irene Papas, with her hauntingly beautiful face and voice, lends the part her royalty and candor...
...she enlarges her personal grief until it turns into a grievance against men in general...
...she calls for the complicity of the Chorus because they are women, and they rally to her ("It's time to honor womankind...
...Even after she has destroyed her own flesh and blood and her associations with her husband, she cannot annihilate her memory...
...In a similar plight Strindberg's Miss Julie elects to do something completely different and so, probably, would the average Miss Smith or Mrs...
...A Greek drama takes its time...
...story did not happen...
...He did The Screens last year in Brooklyn and claims to be "the only director who has staged all of Genet's plays...
...The costumes, designed by Nancy Potts, further separate Medea from the other principals, ahgning her with the Chorus...
...A strain of divinity inherited from her paternal grandfather, Helios the sun-god, may have accounted for her inhuman vengefulness...
...Volanakis fully understands Euripides' intent...
...And Minos Volanakis has had the productive idea of offering an interpretation of Medea here that accentuates the negative...
...it is reflective it insists on tracing connections between one set of myths and another...
...The garment covers but does not hide a violently multihued outfit that suggests Medea's unmournful self, a facet of her personality rarely seen in the play...
...the departing actors leave in a downward spiral motion, as though boring their way toward Hades...
...To appreciate Medea's feelings one does not have to approve of her act...
...Medea, on her first entrance, wears a veil that she promptly lifts and never replaces...
...Euripides in particular, as the director shows us, goes to some trouble to deny suspense so that we may examine the enactment in process, moment by moment...
...The real test of a production of this kind is its deployment of Chorus members...
...The prologue to Euripides' tragedy, spoken by Medea's Nurse, has been slightly amended by Volanakis, who besides being the director is the translator/adapter...
...But Euripides, in" retelling the legend, puts his own stamp on the character...
...no country, nothing but my crime," to sum up her torment and the play's meanings...
...pants into sight, his tongue hardly able to express the horror of the spectacular deaths he has to report...
...Otherwise she forfeits the role of heroine...
...his momentum takes him across the full depth of the stage, but he does' not lose a single word...
...Indeed, I cannot think of another Greek play where the Chorus remains so loyal to the leading character, so openly partisan...
...The text also cuts Jason's reputation down to size his past exploits are shown clearly to depend on his wife's ingenuity, ruth-lessness and love...
...This idea may appear too fashionably Women's Libbish, but Euripides' words support it all the way: Medea has made up her mind not to be used any longer...
...it is one way to glorify her aloneness...
...The French writer does obtrude (and beong), especially when Medea treats her crime as sacredly personal property the only "thing" she owns- that is truly hers...
...Papas has almost no make-up on, only a line of red spots on her brow like a multiplication of the beauty marks (kitinkums) favored by Bharata Natyam dancers...
...Brown...
...The new, larger Circle in the Square on West 50th Street, a block off the old chip, has turned these faults into virtues: With the aid of some expensive architecture, it imitates its parent's cramped space yet cunningly approximates an ancient Greek amphitheater...
...John P. Ryan as Jason puts out a throaty boom that is close to self-parody, but in the end, when he is a broken man, his speech acquires a strangely regular rhythm not unlike that of plainsong...
...That is, she flatly rejects the reality of Medea's fate and just as flatly concedes it...
...With an actress of Papas' caliber, to bare the face is to unveil the soul...
...Not that the dialogue itself is entirely felicitous...
...One must see his Medea, I believe, as a suffering human being, driven almost unwillingly by her private, uncompromising code (with perhaps some nudges from her patron goddess, the sinister Hecate...
...She wears a black peplos with her ancestor's emblem, the sun, embroidered on it, but also in black...
...Like a Genet hero, Medea expects her crime to transfigure and liberate her...
...Reviewers who expressed surprise that she had converted a murderess into a sympathetic figure missed the point...
...Volanakis accordingly presents the play as a conflict between the sexes...
...He rightly refuses to let Medea gloat over her deed the consolation of revenge because he recognizes that by killing her children she has willfully punished herself...
...that Medea had never saved his life and married him, nor followed him back to Iolcus and Corinth...
...The marks may have some arcane Greek, or possibly barbarian, significance as well...
...This Nurse states that the...
...Jason is the culprit for having duped her, and she acts out of shame and self-contempt...
...it demands a ceremonial treatment...
...Medea's ambition is too large: She.yearns to eradicate the past...
...She means to expunge what she regards as his taint in her, and the children, as long as they remain alive, personify that taint...
...Jason remarks, "I am not, as you suspect, tired of you in bed," a line whose coyness would be difficult to top...
...The ceremonial preparations, for the infanticide similarly carry-over-tones of The Maids, Deathwatch and The Blacks...
...As the Messenger, Al Freeman Jr...
...On Stage MEDEA IN NEGATIVE BY ALBERT BERMEL At the previous Circle in the Square on Bleecker Street, where Michael Cacoyannis once contrived bloodless versions of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Aulis, the seating arrangement was awkward and the actors' entrances were difficult...
...she continues to be linked with Jason and with her children...
...A diminutive circular orchestra, home ground for the Chorus, almost blends into the severely raked upper stage, rather than being a distinct playing area...
...In the original text, the Nurse wishes that Jason had never sailed on the Argo to Colchis...
...Our modern inclination is to look at a'Greek play as a suspenseful study in psychosis, and-Volanakis' is trying to change this...
...The veil has another purpose, too...
...When they discover that Medea is about to slaughter her children, they anticipate her blows by striking their own bodies...
...by committing greater and greater crimes he may, if he is lucky, at-, tain to what Genet calls "saints hood...
...he slowly removes his hero's mask as a matching action to Medea's earlier unveiling, and seems to shrink immeasurably...
...Still, much of the translation has a genuinely elegant chime and rhetorical energy, as when Medea cries, "I have no hope...
...By way of contrast, Jason is dressed in a dashing red cloak (that suddenly looks faded when he takes off his mask...
...Vocally the production is at its most daring...
...Volanakis' credits in the program and his work on this play strongly suggest that, in addition, he is attempting to cross-fertilize Euripides with Genet...
...The crime of infanticide remains horrifying, but Medea is what she is...
...Volanakis integrates them into the action, allowing them to flow around the principals like an invading, continuous shadow...
...Later, when Jason learns of the death of his children, he does not stagger or yell or squirm with shock...
...For in Genet's theater the depths of a character's criminality signal the heights of his heroism...
...Then she admits that it did...
...During one superb choral ode they surround her, black on black, with their presences and their song...
...Ron Faber, who plays both the children's Tutor, one of Euripides' typically decrepit fogies, and Creon, the Corinthian ruler, moves effortlessly from cackles and whispers to shouts...
...As a negative device for individualizing his heroine, Volanakis puts all of the other characters in masks...
...Aegeus, the affable and sunny Athenian king who offers Medea refuge, is suitably attired in a blazingly white getup with blue gloves and a blue staff (recalling the water of the Aegean...
Vol. 56 • March 1973 • No. 5
