By Brad Rosenstein

MEDEA MUST HAVE a special resonance for the Shotgun Players: like the mythic princess of Colchis, the company is stuck in an uncomfortable exile. Construction delays and permit problems still prevent Shotgun from inhabiting its long-awaited Allston Street Theatre, but the nomadic approach does have its benefits. The company's production of Medea has brought new life to Berkeley's defunct UC Theatre. The cavernous, historic Greek Revival movie palace, decayed and musty and redolent with ghosts, proves an ideal home for Euripides' classic tale of betrayal and revenge.

The venue is particularly well suited to director Russell Blackwood, whose trademark affinity for Grand Guignol is reflected in this production's potboiler approach. Using a look and tone modeled on Alphonse Mucha's famous poster for Sarah Bernhardt's Medea, this version combines art nouveau stylization and metatheatrical self-consciousness. Under Blackwood, Medea is an actor with a capital A, a self-dramatizing diva whose ultimate audience is herself. An onstage organist (Paula Arciniega) provides suitably creepy underscoring for Medea, a savvy Norma Desmond who never launches a big speech without a helpful musical cue or appropriate mood lighting.

It's an interesting if reductive approach, and Blackwood doesn't seem to have accounted for what actor Beth Donohue brings to the table. Her Medea embraces all of the above ideas but takes them light-years further, revealing layer after layer of emotional complexity. She possesses the fury of a woman scorned intermingled with vulnerability, regret, and a master's relish of her own cunning. Donohue's magnificent vocal skills have rarely been put to better use, and Blackwood is one of the few directors to make equally fine use of her body: her sexually charged Medea is all serpentine arms and sinewy legs. Within the stylized framework, Donohue's extraordinary performance grounds Blackwood's concept in flesh, blood, and spirit.

Unfortunately, nothing else in this production comes close. The other casting is uniformly weak, particularly the male characters, including Jason (Jason Frazier), who come to spar with Medea. Don Seaver's playful organ score is quite effective, but Blackwood's melodramatic approach is only intermittently successful, uncertain in its balance of earnestness and camp. The problem is reflected in Keiko Shimosato's costumes, which vary from Medea's arresting embodiment of matriarchal power to the florid C.B. DeMille rejects worn by the principal men. Melpomene Katakalos's rich scenic design, with its steep rake and glowing depths, and Heather Basarab's shadowy lighting seem more in tune with Blackwood's aims.

Shotgun is always discerning in its choice of translations, and this one, by the late Robinson Jeffers of Big Sur, is excellent. Jeffers's rhythmic, resonant adaptation, originally a Broadway hit for Judith Anderson in 1947, plays beautifully. Would that all of the cast had the chops to make it sing, and that Blackwood had provided a sturdier frame for it. Still, he's clearly a director of intelligence and imagination, and given Shotgun's history of fairly conventional renderings of the Greeks, I applaud the company for trying a more adventurous approach. For all its flaws this production is unquestionably worth seeing for Donohue's electrifying work.

Don't 'Know'

"All events are entirely fictional," a program note for What Cats Know warns, immediately breeding suspicion. The play itself, a world premiere by Chicago playwright Lisa Dillman, only underscores the creeping feeling that someone is taking notes on her life and weaving it into truth-or-dare fiction. Just the names of Dillman's thirtysomething characters – Gregory (Tom Clyde), Cass (Katharine Dunlop), Therese (Lissa Colleen Ferreira), and Kent (Steve Gallion) – tell you a lot about this crew, which is borne out by their pretentious banter, clove cigarettes, and alcoholic beverages of choice.