A ‘Medea’ for the ages

For an actress with dreams of a Tony award, a tragedy from 431 BC might just provide the winning role she’s been looking for.

“Medea,” Euripides’ proto-feminist potboiler about a woman who murders her children to exact revenge on her faithless husband, has landed theater’s top acting honor for three actresses: Judith Anderson (1948), Zoe Caldwell (1982) and Diana Rigg (1994). And if early indications hold true, a fourth name may soon be added.

Reprising her internationally acclaimed portrayal of Medea on Broadway, Irish actress Fiona Shaw has gone from success to success playing the disturbing heroine of Euripides’ masterpiece. Curiously, her performance comes during a fall season when numerous other Greek plays have appeared on New York stages, including Sophocles’ “Antigone” and a trio of rarely revived works by Euripides.

The classics, if you’ll pardon the paradox, have apparently come roaring back into vogue.

Directed by Shaw’s longtime collaborator, Deborah Warner, the Abbey Theatre’s “Medea” made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October after receiving glowing notices in Dublin and London. The plan was for a U.S. tour that included Boston, Washington, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Berkeley, followed by a two-week engagement at the Theatre National de Chaillot in Paris.

But after the raves were confirmed by the notoriously hard-boiled New York drama critics, the producers decided to reschedule the Paris dates in favor of a limited New York run of 84 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theater.

Calling the play “the most essential ticket of this theater season,” Ben Brantley of the New York Times lavishly praised Shaw and Warner for creating “one of the most human Medeas ever.” The sentiment was shared by Charles Isherwood of Variety, who wrote, “Fiona Shaw’s towering performance in the title role makes it clear that Medea is a contemporary human being, too, a painfully real if rarely reasonable woman.”

From the 21st century costumes and manners to Kenneth McLeish’s idiomatically relaxed translation, the production narrows the gap between the ancient world and the present. Even the setting is super-modern, a glass-enclosed home with a wading pool that could pass for a wing of a Beverly Hills health club.

Risky investment

“It’s extraordinarily accessible to today’s audience and to younger people in general,” says producer Roger Berlind, who was drawn into the admittedly risky investment by the fresh energy of the staging and cast.

Dressed in a figure-hugging summer dress, light cardigan and dark sunglasses, Shaw’s Medea is anything but a relic from the annals of Greek mythology. A foreigner from the East eyed suspiciously by her Greek neighbors, she treats her public exchanges -- be they with political dignitaries, her shameless husband, Jason, or a chorus of Corinthian housewives -- as though they were carefully calibrated press conferences.

If Jason -- played by the gleaming Jonathan Cake as a self-absorbed GQ cover boy -- thinks he can dump her into a life of exile after she’s committed foul crimes (including butchering her brother) to make his reputation, well, he’s got another think coming. Can he really believe she’s going to passively accept his opportunistic marriage to the Princess of Corinth? Not for nothing is Medea an expert in poisons.

The crisp characterizations of this production are in keeping with the way the playwright himself re-imagined his culture’s most famous myths. Euripides’ down-and-dirty approach, more realistic than that of Aeschylus or Sophocles, is perhaps what makes his work so peculiarly akin to our modern sensibility.

But what gives his plays their uncanny immediacy is the way they combine surprising familiarity with a timeless honesty that has the effect of a cold-water splash in the face.

With its long speeches powerfully articulating the tribulations of womanhood, “Medea” has been often heralded as a pre-feminist revenge play. Warner and Shaw’s demythologizing treatment focuses attention on the ceaseless battle between men and women, invoking at times the brawling spouses of August Strindberg and Edward Albee. To drive home the point that there’s no easy escape from the circuit of marital suffering, the production denies Medea her magic chariot at the end.

“As there are no stage directions in Greek drama, there’s no reason to take literally the chariot at the end,” Warner says in defense of her nontraditional interpretation. “But more important, it would be unseemly to have Medea fleeing the bloody scene triumphant.”

Certainly, the desolate, everybody-loses ending underscores the way dehumanizing treatment can provoke dehumanizing acts of violence in turn, a quintessential Euripidean theme all too evident in our daily headlines of suicide bombings and military reprisals.

Medea is a victim who becomes an elemental force of vengeance, a woman who forfeits her humanity for vindictive satisfactions. Writing in a war-torn age, Euripides knew that the world couldn’t be neatly divided between the innocent and the guilty and that hidden within unjust suffering is a powder keg of potentially catastrophic consequences ready to explode if not properly redressed.

“What’s so fascinating is the way Euripides brings us so close into the interior of Medea’s experience,” says Warner. “While we can’t approve her shocking acts, we understand the journey that brought her there.”

There is no better sign of a playwright’s continued ability to speak to an audience than revivals of his work. Last month in New York, three hip downtown theaters were showcasing plays by Euripides: “The Phoenician Women” at the Ohio, “Iphigenia in Tauris” at HERE and an adaptation of “The Bacchae” called “Bacchus” at the Metropolitan Playhouse.

Challenging audiences

Produced on shoestring budgets by emerging theater artists, the productions were testaments to the power of a writer unafraid to challenge an audience with story lines that critique as well as entertain.

Whether laying bare the necessity of religious irrationality within our smugly rational society (“Bacchus”) or the spiraling havoc of familial revenge (“The Phoenician Women”), the plays probe deeply into the often violent mystery of humanity’s inner workings. Even a relatively larkish play like “Iphigenia in Tauris” conjures a poignant fantasy in which the sacrifices of war are, at least for Orestes and his supposedly slain sister Iphigenia, miraculously recovered.

Though revivals of Euripides are more common in smaller venues, Greek drama has a successful track record on Broadway. The Almeida Theatre Company’s 1994 “Medea” not only nabbed a Tony for its star but did such solid business during its 12-week run that one of the producers placed an ad in Theater Week thanking Rigg for “making the oldest play on Broadway the hottest ticket in town.”

David Leveaux’s 1999 Broadway production of Sophocles “Electra,” starring Zoe Wanamaker, not only was nominated for multiple Tonys but also was extended for a total run of 116 performances.

Clearly, there’s still a hunger for substantive drama. At a time of terror alerts and talk of war, an exclusive diet of insular domestic comedies just isn’t satisfying. If the New York fall season is any gauge, reflection may be gaining on mindless laughter as a box-office draw.

Even Al Pacino has caught the Greek bug. He’s been working at the Actors Studio in New York with director Estelle Parsons and costar Dianne Wiest on “Oedipus Rex,” which he plans to perform in repertory with Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” at the Daryl Roth Theater once the current show, “De La Guarda,” completes its run.

“We started on this project two years when no one was doing the classics,” says Parsons. “Now they’re all the rage. But the moment is obviously well suited when you consider what’s going on in the world.”

More evidence of the trend’s timeliness can be found in a critically celebrated production of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” which was brought to Manhattan’s City Center for a brief run in October by the National Theater of Greece. Performed in modern Greek with English supertitles, the play, through its rubble-strewn staging, offered startling images of a civilization morally shattered by civil strife and bloodshed.

The story of a woman sentenced to death for burying the corpse of her political outlaw brother, “Antigone” examines whether public security should ever be allowed to trump private rights. Given such richly talented actors as Lydia Koniordou and Sophoclis Peppas, who played the at-loggerheads Antigone and Creon, there was no need to point out the current pertinence of the conflict.

Like Euripides’ “Medea,” Sophocles’ tragedy contains a wisdom that is untethered to current events. Meaning resides in action and character, not in topicality. So, the undying truth of these plays lends itself to any age with the courage to travel deeper into its own soul. “I would go so far as to say that the Greeks may be our only salvation,” says Warner. “Where else can you explore in relative safety our moral and philosophical extremes?”