Medea dearest
Abbey Theatre's adaptation of Euripedes' play is thrilling and imaginative.

By Robert Avila

THE PATIO OF a half-finished mansion is on set designer Tom Pye's stage as Medea opens, and we sense the contradictions in an austere but familial scene: before a large glass corridor running the length of the stage, cinder blocks on wooden pallets and other building materials ring a small pool, while children's toys lie carelessly strewn about, telltale details from a life in the limbo of exile, and a sly augury of danger, too, in the playground children make of a construction site – all those rough surfaces and jagged edges so unfit for soft, clumsy flesh.

Medea is typically held aloft in a god's chariot, deus ex machina, at the end of Euripides' play. But in the Abbey Theatre production – the much lauded, Broadway-bound adaptation by Ireland's national company – longtime collaborators Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw conspire to keep the spurned wife of Jason (of Golden Fleece fame) down here on earth. That seems to be where she belongs. Not merely some ancient or ancestor, Medea the child-killer is clearly one of us.

In fact, the triumph of director Warner's fast-paced, modernized version of the Greek tragedy largely rests in her and Shaw's ability to convincingly fit the sweeping proportions of this furious, frightening, but sympathetic sorceress into our own backyard. A lean figure in dark glasses, athletic shoes, and a simple dress topped by a frumpy sweater, Shaw's Medea takes the stage looking like a depressed housewife recovering from a bender. She's an electrifying presence yet life-size, utterly human. She vacillates between vulnerability and a startlingly ferocious resilience, her every nuance suggesting a woman driven to further and further extremes by love.

Those extremes have their own logic or, rather, amplify and pervert the usual logic of love, jealousy, pride, and self-preservation – not to mention the maternal instinct. After Medea betrays her own people to help her Greek lover, and even kills her own brother, her universe revolves solely around Jason (a manly Jonathan Cake in jeans and T-shirt), who for his part has formed a new alliance with the daughter of King Kreon of Corinth (Struan Rodger). Having destroyed the world she came from, she finds herself in the contradictory situation of destroying her family in order to save it. "Best to do what I do best," is all she can say.

Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael's superbly accessible translation gives further bite and immediacy to a production that, while marred somewhat by an uneven cast, including a chorus of Irish womenfolk who never quite achieve the necessary parity with Medea, nevertheless manages a complex portrait that's also a thrilling ride. In the end, an earth-bound Medea and Jason sit (together at last!) in a state of eternal misery, bereft of progeny, an infinite finitude Beckett-like in its mutuality.

Thought crime

"What have you been doing?" Menocchio's wife asks. "I've been thinking!" he replies triumphantly. "Thinking's bad for your health!" she chastises him, though to no avail. Menocchio (Charles Dean), a humble miller in 16th-century Italy, is determined to use that brain of his. He gazes off into space, contemplating the heavens (an enormous chart of the Copernican universe, in Alexander V. Nichols's elegant and ingenious stage design). Of course, his wife (Jeri Lynn Cohen), for all her hectoring provincialism, is absolutely right. Thinking will be very bad for Menocchio's health.

Menocchio, writer-director Lillian Groag's new comedy, draws on Carlo Ginzburg's celebrated history of a 16-century miller tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake for heresy. Decades before the more famous trial of Galileo Galilei, Domenego Scandella, called Menocchio, advanced a startlingly original conception of the universe that challenged the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church in the period of the Counter-Reformation. His inquisitors did their best to discover where his ideas (about everything from the divinity of Christ to the origins of life) came from, while his frightened and obsequious neighbors testified against him.

Groag's development of Menocchio as a tragicomic hero of intellectual freedom achieves decidedly mixed results. Ken Ruta as the Inquisitor does the best work in a role that brings to mind Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor, who quashes mankind's freedom to preserve its happiness, but in general, despite a very capable cast, the humor and drama feel thin and forced. The ever skillful Dean plays Menocchio as curious and cranky, not to say a crank, but has little more to reveal about the character along the way.

Comedy, of course, can be subversive, especially as a vehicle for ideas that are otherwise unapproachable, an aspect entirely in keeping with the theme of the play. The humor here, however, relies mostly on slapstick and bawdy jokes that have little to do with the themes treated, beyond underscoring the immaturity and simplemindedness of Menocchio's fellow peasants. It ends up seeming like a retreat from the story's more challenging aspects.

'Medea' runs Wed/20-Fri/22, 8 p.m.; Sat/23, 2 p.m. (also Sat/23, 8 p.m.); Sun/24, 3 p.m., Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley, near Bancroft and Telegraph, Berk; $36-$56. (510) 642-9988. 'Menocchio' runs through Dec. 21. Wed., 7 p.m.; Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Thurs/21, Nov. 30, Dec. 7, 12, and 21, 2 p.m.; Dec. 21, show at 2 p.m. only; no show Nov. 28); Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk. $38-$54. (510) 647-2949.