The first striking thing about Simon Stone’s new production of a play he has written, called Medea, is how it’s referenced on the title page of the program. “After Euripides,” the credit reads—not “adapted from,” not “based on,” not “inspired” by, but “after,” as if to emphasize that the work we’re about to see will unfold in an entirely different time, place, and context than the classic Greek tragedy.
On this you can rely: This Medea offers all the horror of the original, down to the unthinkable act that it’s sometimes reduced to. Stone’s play is, in fact, more unrelentingly bleak than his blazing, shattering Yerma (“after” Federico García Lorca), which transferred to New York two years ago, after a triumphant run at the Young Vic. As before, the playwright and director seems less interested in catharsis than in a grueling account of a woman’s emotional and psychological breakdown, fueled by her own mighty spirit and forces conspiring against it. One conceit, in fact, is that the children in the story—the sons of Anna, a research scientist, and Lucas, her colleague and husband, who respectively parallel Medea and Jason—are crafting a video documentary of their home life. A large screen hovers over the stage, projecting their mother’s face, at various points, in merciless closeups. (Other reminders that we’re not in ancient Corinth anymore include nods to TikTok and antidepressants.)
Anna is played, in a revelatory performance, by Rose Byrne, whose delicate beauty has been caressed by cameras in a wide array of film and TV roles. Here, she is an utter wreck from the get-go—her hair stringy and matted, her lovely face a map of the raw anguish Anna struggles to suppress through burning eyes, and smiles so strained it almost hurts to look at them. We learn that Anna had been away from home before the play starts, following an incident, driven by betrayal, that did irreparable harm to her already shaky marriage, as well as her career. (Stone studied the real-life case of Debora Green, who in the ’90s pleaded no contest to poisoning her husband and burning down the family home, killing two of her children in the process.)
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
Bobby Cannavale, Byrne’s real-life partner and the father of her two children—and one of the most brilliant stage actors of his generation—plays Lucas, who like Jason is set to discard the partner who has utterly devoted her life and talents to him in favor of a new model who will serve him further, in this case the 24-year-old daughter of the wealthy man who has overseen his, and Anna’s, work. It’s a tribute to Cannavale and Byrne, so sexually magnetic as individuals and as a couple, that they make Anna’s desperation and Lucas’s revulsion so convincing and compelling, while allowing for flashes of the old heat between the characters.
Stone doesn’t make it easy for us to just dismiss Lucas as a spineless, self-serving weasel—not initially, anyway. Anna’s estranged spouse must contend with, in addition to her increasingly erratic and threatening behavior, his spoiled child of a girlfriend, deftly portrayed by Madeline Weinstein, and her graciously domineering father, played with chilling amiability by Dylan Baker. There are also Lucas and Anna’s own kids; rather than simply presenting them as naïve victims, Stone gives them distinct, sometimes clashing personalities: Edgar, played by Jolly Swag at the preview I attended, is by turns moody and mischievous, intent on protecting and defending his mother, while Orson Hong’s Gus is more carefree. (Gabriel Amoroso and Emeka Guindo respectively play Edgar and Gus at alternate performances.) This approach not only makes the children more credible in a contemporary setting, but actually, by revealing them as fleshed-out humans in their own right, enhances the pathos of their fate.
Stone and set designer Bob Cousins let the action—which also involves a sympathetic social worker played by Jordan Boatman, and a sympathetic bookshop manager played by Victor Almanzar, both essentially sounding boards for Anna’s growing despair—spill out against a backdrop of pure white, at once stark and sterile. It’s the lab in which Anna will devise and complete her final, devastating project, and before this production has run its roughly 80-minute course, it will be streaked with fake blood and splattered with black ash. Stone’s Medea is, nonetheless, less physically gory than numerous stagings of Euripides’s play and other classic tragedies I’ve seen; words, both said and unsaid, are what sting the most.
“There’s a lot for us to get used to,” Lucas says at the beginning, but the tragedy of this story—like the original, and like so many others, in life and art—is that everyone has limits to what he or she can withstand. While Stone doesn’t justify Anna’s ultimate, unfathomable acts any more than Euripides did Medea’s, he too gives us sobering insights into the ravages of injustice, both social and personal, on even a resilient soul.
Medea opened January 30, 2020, at the BAM Harvey Theater and runs through March 8. Tickets and information: bam.org
