John Steinbeck writes in Once There Was a War, “The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed.” And there is an undeniable truth about the seemingly impossible resilience of theater, due in large part to its timeless expression of the human experience. Euripides's Medea, first produced in 431 BCE, is then the representation of everything that makes art immortal — its themes of power, persecution and ostracization; character motivations of justice and revenge and the classic trope “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Premiering Feb. 18 in the bare intimacy of the Burlington Road Building’s black box theater, Dooley’s Players’ Medea tells the story of its eponymous character abandoning her home and family for the love of the “heroic” Jason, who in turn deserts her and their two young sons to marry into Corinthian royalty. We first see Medea as a silhouette, wailing as she paces behind a sheer curtain, conveying an image that she is constantly fading into smoke at the edges — she is ephemeral, fleeting and intangible as other characters perceive her to be by underestimating her. We find quickly that this is not the case, as she schemes to murder Jason’s new bride, Princess Glauce, and her father, King Creon, as well as — most horrifyingly — her two sons, whose deaths reverberate throughout the entirety of the second act.
College sophomore Nakiyah Flowers blossoms as Medea, hitting every beat with indescribable nuance and delicacy, never giving the impression that she is playing the sorceress, but rather, becoming her. She struggles to choke out her lines between her sobs, and when she clutches at her chest, we know it is because she feels physical pain from the dread of what she must do; when she lowers her voice and persuades Creon to let her remain in Corinth for another day, we berate him for his foolishness while knowing that we ourselves never could have refused her coquettish charm. It is impossible to tell when Medea is dangerous or seductive, simply because she is constantly and inextricably both.
Flowers and College sophomore Geoffrey Solomon’s Jason generate a unique chemistry together, locked in a tense standoff reflecting the dynamicism and passions of the relationship with your ex you are grateful you never had. Solomon, clad as though coming offstage after performing with his boy band, lacks the bluster necessary to play such a callously masculine role, not because he doesn’t care about women but because he doesn’t seem to care much for them. Other cast members also had opportunities to shine — College freshman Lucy Hansen as the endearingly oblivious Tutor; College sophomore Charis Wiltshire’s voice of morality oscillating between playing with the audience and tearing at our heartstrings as she begs for Medea’s children’s lives; College freshman Josh Oberlander-Denny as the traumatized messenger and College sophomore Adam Friedman as Aegeus, the gossipy, flamboyant wind god to whom Medea goes for support and comedic relief, often more Regina George than Greek deity.
In a visionary attempt to introduce another dimension into the performance and alleviate the tension with physical cathartic release, College sophomore and director Isaac Andrade recruited four masked dancers to be “illustrative of both Medea’s emotional state and the public’s fickle reaction to the unfolding of this great tragedy,” according to the program. At moments, the dancers stumbled on overly complex choreography or relied heavily on their music choices to speak for their movement; in other instances, however, they conveyed their respective plot points with breathtaking precision and beauty. College freshman Kelly Vogel’s portrayal of Princess Glauce’s graceful death can only be described as poetry, and the dancers impressively project confusion, desperation, maternal love, joy, power, freedom and toward the end indecision followed by strength and resolve, often within seconds. The choreography manages the same ageless blending of classical with modern that the costuming accomplishes — the balletic rigidity juxtaposed with sudden low lunges and gaga-esque improvisation, flexed feet following pristine pointe work.
Yet the same artistic ambition that has given Medea such a contemporary and relevant voice simultaneously stifles it. Andrade interweaves voice recordings into the performance that had the potential to transcend Medea into a deeply challenging and satisfying piece. But the recordings are jarring, disembodied, exotically out of place and low-quality; indeed, it was blatantly obvious that the Greek chorus of dancers and assorted cast members could have sufficed to provide the live representation the play demanded. The voice actors too often sounded as though they were on the verge of bursting into sarcastic laughter, wrenching attention from the morbid content before us. In one memorable moment toward Medea’s conclusion, we hear the voice of a young child screaming lines like, “Mommy, please don’t kill us!” and “We can’t escape her knife!” that are so glaringly scripted they shatter the fourth wall and jerk us from our reverie.
Unfortunately, Medea’s greatest flaw stems not from its direction or cast, but from the writing itself. Too often the plot advances with gelatinous lethargy as consecutive monologues tell rather than show, then tell again … and again … and again. Flowers shrieks and weeps to the best of her considerable ability, but the repetition of the same plot points — that Medea betrayed her home, is forsaken by Jason — become tiresome to any actor, insulting to any audience’s intelligence and neglectful of the relationship building so necessary in theater.
Finally, I cannot help but question the legitimacy of the “feminism” Medea hopes to capture. While it hopes to join the likes of films such as Carrie, The Witch and Kill Bill — stories of isolated, furious women — we wonder whether Medea is ever truly empowered. She kills her own children to spite a man whose whims serves as the primary (if not sole) motivation for her every action, leaving herself more broken than he ever is. It seems her story cannot exist independently of a man’s, which does the greatest disservice to a character with such force and brilliance.
When Solomon, emotionally distraught and unstable, roars his way millimeters from Flowers’s face, accusing her of being “not a woman but a beast, a tiger, but more savage,” we expect physical violence — yet she simply walks away. This — this is power. When Solomon dryly remarks, “if only children can be got some other way without the female sex,” triggering an outcry of shock and invective from the audience (“Jesus! What the hell!”), when we are told that death is preferable to a woman’s life if she has no magic to wield, when Medea whispers, “We women … I won’t say we are bad by nature, but we are what we are,” when secondary female characters are stripped of identity and made anonymous with masks, we hate and condemn the misogyny thrust upon us but become frustrated with Medea’s inability or unwillingness to fight it. Perhaps what makes Medea most timeless, then, is the same paradoxical box that we have and continue to thrust society’s women into over millennia, never allowing their wrath and their nurture to coexist, never giving their narratives the complexity they are worth.
And herein lies the greatest tragedy of all, for Flowers is indeed a tiger — if only Medea would free her from her cage.
Grade: B+
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