Challenging ‘MedeaText’ Plugs Into Modern Culture

Director Frederique Michel and her longtime associate Charles A. Duncombe Jr. scale exhilarating heights in “MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore,” a radical retelling of the Medea legend based on Heiner Muller’s original play, as translated by Carl Weber.

The production has its rough edges, including a couple of amateurish performances and the occasional slip into tonal excess--a not-uncommon City Garage failing. Despite these shortcomings, an atmosphere of rigorous professionalism prevails, from Michel’s stringent staging to Duncombe’s wonderfully evocative production design to Lee C. Smith’s inventive costumes, which feature such bizarre innovations as a see-through cellophane hoop skirt--a melding of Old World decorum and New Age license that is very much to the philosophical point.

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Set in a bleak, postindustrial Los Angeles dreamscape, the play opens with Medea (at least, one of them--the role is played by three actresses) sitting in a sandbox, nude. Medea’s hands are red with the gore of her recent slaughter, yet she stares expressionlessly out at the audience, devoid of affect or emotion. White masks are evenly interspersed among the trash-strewn sandboxes that border the stage--a double-edged symbol of Los Angeles as terminus, both geographical and spiritual, where the land drops abruptly into the sea but the sewage of Hollywood mass culture seeps ever outward.

The female anatomy is prominently on display throughout, although not in any exploitative sense. The play evolves into a piercing examination of male entitlement and female rage, with a particular emphasis on the constant objectification of the female form, from network television to Internet porn.

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Challenging and abrasive stuff, this is far from a feminist diatribe. The dialectic is evenly balanced and surprisingly funny. In one amusing video segment, projected live on an screen, “scholars” face off in front of cameras to discuss Medea’s motivations, each passionately promoting his or her own skewed agenda. Various Jasons in Armani chat glibly on cell phones while a fetish-clad chorus cavorts hilariously. Medea’s alter egos, pale women in black leather jackets, sweep about like birds of prey. And all the while, Medea sits, staring.

In Michel’s clockwork staging, the actors move with the eerie inexorability of automata, dehumanized and pitiless. But it is Duncombe’s adaptation of Muller’s meager text that is the true triumph of the evening. A theatrical exegesis that expounds brilliantly upon the original, Duncombe’s reworking plugs into the malaise of modern culture--that dreary, fleshly round--and sharply illuminates the spiritual emptiness that results when human beings are relentlessly reduced to objects.

* “MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends July 9. $20. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.