Updated Medea Frames in Double Vision

Two and a half millennia since it was first enacted, the story of Medea still has the power to captivate. No wonder the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club has decided to present the drama in a stunning production this weekend at the Loeb Experimental Theater.

Directed and scripted by Rebecca R. Kastleman ’05 and produced by Katherine J. Thompson ’05, themedea is an original adaptation of Heiner Müller’s 1989 prose poem “Medea Material,” which in turn is an avant-garde recreation of Euripides’ ancient tale.

The production attempts the total modernization of the ancient text. It is immediately and unmistakably avant-garde, utilizing nearly every tool available to theater to explore the legend of Medea. The play is intricately choreographed, in many places more akin to modern ballet than to anything Euripides could have imagined.

The choreography is not merely for its own sake; though initially a bit difficult to understand, the dance scenes do a superb job of introducing the themes and mood of the show.

Similarly, the music casts a fresh light on the old story. The score evokes feelings of instability and duress, allowing the psychological concerns of the narrative to come to the forefront. This is far from a standard background soundtrack: the haunting, reverberating strings, ethereal chanting and, particularly, the primordial-sounding percussion are immediate and affecting, speaking just as eloquently as the dialogue.

One of the most striking facets of the play is its stage design. The action takes place on a field of blinding plain white, giving the stage the feel of a canvas. “Play” is almost the wrong word for what is to occur there—“production” is much more fitting for this expressionist happening. Landmarks on stage are eschewed for two panes of glass, and everything is either white or clear. The stage’s distinguishing mark is its emptiness.

This feeling of discrete depictions of moments rather than a linear narrative is further emphasized by perhaps the play’s most unconventional feature: the use of two actors each to play both Jason (Todd C. Bartels ’06 and Josh Clay Phillips ’07) and Medea (Susan E. McGregor ’05 and Adele Jerista), essentially the only characters. This decision inverts the practice of having one actor take on multiple roles, forcing the audience to see the action as if reflected in a broken mirror.

Fittingly, mirrors are a frequent motif in the production, as is symmetry. Images recur, often happening twice simultaneously, giving the effect of parallax. This device serves both to represent the situation’s independence of time, or to simulate the internal repetition in the characters’ minds of the painful events that transpire.

The bifurcation of the main characters is complemented by the condensation of the chorus. Here Medea, given the freedom to speak with herself, can finally act as just another woman of Corinth, escaping from the separation she faced in the original.

Though at an abstract level the leveling of the chorus may seem antidemocratic, in practice it disperses the site of the conflict. Medea’s struggle is no longer that of just one woman, but rather a general feminist dilemma.

The doubling psychologizes the drama. Just as for betrayed Medea all that exists are thoughts of revenge on Jason and disgust with herself, so too on stage there are only variants of the two. The audience is brought in uncomfortably close proximity to her crisis.

Though many areas of the medea are purely modern, the dialogue presents a curious marriage of the ancient and the current. Stylistically, the words maintain a poetic, terse quality reminiscent of the original Medea. The prose here is succinct yet hazy, building up meaning though many small declarations rather than direct statements, as if a pointillist painting.

The differences in specific lines from what Euripides might have said are mostly modernizations, which are wholly fitting; to stock a production so unsettling with only tropes about nature would be contrary to the mood. In this age the industrial must make an appearance.

The total effect of the performance is a profound delving into the problem of Medea. The narrative is reduced to short, non-chronological scenes as sparks to illuminate the greater story. It is as if the scenes are coagulations of the blood spilled so many years ago, visible manifestations of suffering and distress.

Ultimately, the production shows that a true classic will never age. The human quest for fulfillment, painful as it can be, is just as touching today as it was at the advent of theater.

Tickets to the medea are free and available at the Loeb Box Office. Performances began last night and continue today at 7:30 and 10 and Saturday at 2:30 and 7:30.