The ghastly glory of ‘Medea’

NEW YORK -- Of all the high-profile attempts to open Broadway’s sleepy eyes to far-flung artistry, nothing this season compares to the daring, the intimate theatricality and revelatory humanity of Fiona Shaw in “Medea.”

Forget all assumed familiarity with Euripides’ tragedy or the impulse to dismiss infanticide as, well, perhaps a holiday downer. Deborah Warner’s modern-day vision and Shaw’s performance are unforgettable, the sort of experience that makes one regret the overuse of the word on so much of the barely remembered.

This is the same 90-minute update of the 2,400-year-old stunner that sold out a short visit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in October. The Abbey Theatre production, already celebrated on the West End, has been transferred in all its ghastly glory to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for two brief months.

We lose the Brooklyn venue’s sunken amphitheater view of the family swimming pool in the proscenium theater. In all other ways, however, the passion is still magnificent and awful. This is definitely not your mother’s “Medea.” As Shaw leaves the luxury and lost sanctity of the modern glass house her Medea shared with Jason and their two beautiful little boys, we cannot imagine how this production will shatter collected pieties about unfathomable cruelties and the sorceress’ revenge.

This is a devastating portrait of a marriage -- actually, a celebrity marriage -- and the contradictory impulses that betrayal can wrench from a desperate, adoring wife. In the conversational but never jarring translation by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, the story is as psychologically complex and horrifically familiar as the news. Nothing feels pushed or shoved into relevance. Yet, when we see one of the children try to make a run from his mother’s bloody knife, there is no escaping the memories of dead babies bathed in the waters of defiled American domesticity.

Tom Pye’s unsettling set keeps us captive in the courtyard outside the glass doors of an unfinished dream house. Characters dash down the aisles from King Kreon’s castle and descend into what we imagine to be a rec room beneath the children’s swimming pool.

There is a Greek chorus of ordinary women, hangers-on to the stars, with international accents to match their workaday jobs and everyday modern clothes. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are inseparable from character, especially the summer-print housedress that the barelegged Shaw uses to make Medea seem dowdy and sensual at the same time.

Shaw, with her long, hard bones and Cubist face, is a Medea with the smarts to feel appalled by her obsession with Jason -- played with pumped-up boyish confidence by Jonathan Cake. For all her jealousy, her fury at his duplicity and her self-loathing for caring so much, she cannot stop her body from melting into his whenever he touches her. There is an intelligent, wronged woman’s sense of absurdity here, an almost playful incredulity about being the foreign wife traded for a younger royal trophy.

We may not believe, in our more rational corners of the psyche, that she has no choice but to slaughter the lives they made together. But this Medea, whose interaction with the children’s toys is almost as moving as her relationship with the boys, makes us see it her way. As she stays to stare at Jason, splashing him as a child teases for attention, the beauty of the horror is almost unbearable.

*

‘Medea’

Where: Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St., New York

When: Mondays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 22

Price: $60-$80

Contact: (212) 307-4100 or (800) 755-4000

Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes