Word: medea
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...such an enlightened vein, my English accomplice (an expert in matters thespian) and I trekked through the wilds of Brattle Street to see some play called Medea. By a Greek apparently, and a rather old one--or so I was led to believe...
Fortunately so, for I would have hated to squander the delights of Medea. Really brave of these Harvard thespians to tell a story about infanticide and make it into bravura cabaret. Rhythmic dancing heralded the beginning, sturdy men waddled onto stage with oh-so-low booming voices, and the dancers and performers artfully tripped over most of the set. Of course, there were the contemporary references of great import. You know the sort--men are shits, women are great, long live the individual. And then in the orgiastic confusion of the ending, Medea ascended in a spaceship, following a compelling...
Valerie Weinstein's direction and Yvonne Roemer's choreography of this production are also only partially successful. The characters' movements, even in the segments involving no dancing, are highly stylized--Medea waves her arms in ostentatious anger and the chorus members clutch their stomachs when Medea mentions killing her children. This type of exaggerated, ritualistic movement is apparently in recognition of the classic origins of the play...
Sometimes this effect works nicely, especially in a scene where Medea flinches at Jason's touch; the abstracted, impersonal movements of the characters up to this point render this contact all the more frightening. But usually the mechanical, showy movements just make the actors seem stilted and vaguely uncomfortable...
Despite the efforts of some genuinely talented actors, this Medea suffers from overambition. The production tries to be both immediately relevant and classically grand, all with lavish, distracting special effects. Somewhere under all this, the human drama gets drowned...