Bobby Cannavale plays Lucas, and Madeline Weinstein plays Clara, his lover, in Simon Stone’s update of Euripides’ Medea at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn.
The script for Simon Stone’s Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) carries the notation “after Euripides.” Anyone who attends and expects tunics and armbands will therefore be disappointed: Stone has modernized the story of the spurned wife of Jason, the Argonaut who turned to the daughter of Creon for physical comfort. His version changes the names of the characters: Medea is Anna; Jason is Lucas; Creon is Christopher; and Creon’s daughter, who doesn’t appear in Euripides, is named Clara and is very much present.
Bob Cousins sets the action in an abstract surrounding of bare white walls and floors. Longtime theater lovers will recognize the homage to Peter Brook’s 1963 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was set in a white box, but they can expect that, since this is Medea, there won’t be many guffaws.
In the opening of Euripides’ version (translated by Simon Goldfield), the Nurse speaks about Jason taking the daughter of King Creon to bed, and the reaction of the spurned Medea.
Since first she knew the wrong her husband did her,
She lies there fasting, with her body bowed
In grief, and wastes the whole long day in tears.
Byrne’s Anna in an alcoholic stupor with Gabriel Amoroso as her son Edgar.
Stone, who also directs, leans heavily on psychology and technology to tell his version. As in the opening of Euripides’ version, Anna (Rose Byrne) has also been wronged, but she is more than grief-stricken and has gone further than railing against Lucas (Bobby Cannavale). She has been caught after attempting to poison him, and has returned to town on a work release program. But Lucas has moved on, with Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the boss’s daughter.
Lucas and Anna have two children, Edgar, a particularly bratty spawn played with teeth-grinding obnoxiousness by Gabriel Amoroso, who is likely to give prospective parents the willies, and Gus (Emeka Guindo), a more likable kid.
What follows is a cringe-inducing, granular examination of a failed relationship that lumbers rather than soars to its conclusion. Julia Frey’s videos project the characters’ faces in close-up on a huge scrim that often rises as the actors perform below but occasionally shows them offstage—one conceit is that Gus has a video camera and is shooting a school project, so he films them in bed; in a real world, the camera would have been confiscated long before.
But technology is crucial to this version. It’s Anna’s discovery of a sext from Clara to Lucas that spurs the poisoning, using castor seeds, the source of ricin. Byrne is by turns steely and ingratiating, but her Anna does nothing by half measures. The result is akin to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread. She describes the aftermath to Herbert (Victor Almanzar), the bookshop owner whom she works for in her release program.
He’d be vomiting all night. And stay home for a few days. And I’d nurse him. The four of us lay in bed together, the boys and Lucas and me and we’d joke around. It was a nice time.
Byrne (center) with Emeka Guindo as her son Gus and Jordan Boatman as his social worker, Elsbeth. Photographs by Richard Termine.
Once caught, though, “Lucas convinced me to put myself in psychiatric detention to avoid going to jail,” she says. Now that she’s out, she relentlessly worms herself back into Lucas’s life—though he has custody of the children and wants little to do with her. But bit by bit she maneuvers him until they’re in bed again. It all feels predictable, even if well-acted by the cast, whose film and TV experience makes the close-ups as powerful as the theatrical moments. They include Dylan Baker as Christopher, who is Lucas’s boss and Clara’s father, as well as Anna’s former employer at a pharmaceutical company, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, a social worker who looks after the children during the day when both parents work.
None of it is particularly moving, unless it counts to have an urge to yell “You dolt!” when Cannavale’s accommodating Lucas cedes another inch to Anna’s manipulations. Late in the play there’s a left-field feminist twist, as Anna claims to have done the legwork for a major drug for which Lucas took credit:
[E]very godforsaken night that you came home from the lab we sat up and I figured it out for you, sketched out the formulas, rewrote all your mistakes. I was saving you from a career disaster.
Neither that revelation nor a couple of stunning visuals—the white surroundings are doomed to be sullied, of course—make a case that Medea needed updating in this way.
Simon Stone’s version of Medea, a co-production of BAM, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and David Lan, plays at the BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton St., Brooklyn) through March 8. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, call (718) 636-4100 or visit bam.org.
