A too-modern "Medea' in an Athens restroom

The last time I saw a play by the German poet-playwright Heiner Müller, the Wilma (then based at the Adrienne Theater on Sansom Street) staged his Quartet— a re-imagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Blanka Zizka's psychologically gripping depiction, which featured a corseted Pierce Bunting and semi-nude Janis Dardaris, still ranks as one of the best productions I've ever witnessed.

But nothing that I've seen in at least five years in Philadelphia could have prepared me for what I watched in Athens the other night. The English-language weekly Athens News listed the Asipka theatre company performing Müller's triptych Waterfront Wasteland/ Medea Material/ Landscape with Argonauts in the Bios Toilettes. Strange name for a bar, I thought, and when I arrived, discovered the place's name only accounted for half of the location.

When the stage manager called for the show to begin, most of the patrons rose from their chairs, drinks still in hand, and descended down a dual flight of stairs— right into the toilettes, where in a space adjoining the washroom sat four rows of chairs bunched tightly together.

The performers— Irini Drakou (Medea) and Prodromos Tsinikoris (Jason)— emerged from adjacent stalls, each carrying a chair, which they unfolded on the "stage" before completely stripping out of their clothes.

She’s Greek, he’s German

Like Quartet, Müller's work in this trilogy draws on another author's source— in this case, Medea by Euripedes, which, like Quartet, Müller tells entirely with two actors. In Asipka’s production, director Dimitri Bitos accentuated the differences between the respective cultures by having Medea speak her lines in Greek, while Jason rendered his in German. Although I studied Ancient Greek for several years in grad school and have attempted to learn German over the past 18 months, I gleaned only the general thrust of the action.

But thanks to these two performers and this director, my limited language skills sufficed— enough to leave me completely disturbed by this Medea Material. After stripping out of their clothes, the two revealed themselves completely to one another, first by reading the lines from their respective scripts held in front of them. Then Drakou unloaded the crux of the piece; she's killed her two children that Jason has fathered. At this point Tsinikoris snapped his book shut and threw it across the room, then whipped Drakou’s chair around to face a row of sinks and large mirror before hastily putting his clothes back on and berating her for ten minutes.

But Drakou sat unfazed. At the end of his tirade, she repositioned her chair to face the audience, spread her legs wide and, staring straight ahead, launched into her defense of a woman scorned who took the only vengeance available to an outsider. Angry tears streamed down her face, her eyes twitched, and the Greek words— spit out in carefully parsed phrases as she clapped her hands with increasing rapidity— sounded like the haunting language of the Furies.

Feigned sodomy at Theatre Exile

In the past five years, I've seen my share of disturbing theater in Philadelphia, including Theatre Exile's twin productions of the works of Tracy Letts (Killer Joe and Bug), both of which featured plenty of full frontal nudity. The former included a scene in which John Lumia sodomized Mary Lee Bednarik with a chicken bone. But both Lumia and Letts managed to extract comedy (albeit dark comedy) from the encounter.

By contrast, any interpretation of Medea— a woman who kills her own children— should horrify. But in this production, an accident of Drakou’s history made the evidence unequivocal.

As she delivered a 15-minute monologue of vengeance, Drakou held her belly while using her thumb to stroke the scar from a botched Caesarean she had experienced (I learned later) as a teenager. That visible wound and the wracked emotional contortions of her face made it clear that these were her own children she murdered. Like the rest of the audience, I had to avert my eyes, unable to look upon a woman who could commit such a conflicted act so callously. Even Exile’s recent Bug seemed like a fun evening in comparison.

The past few seasons have seen several Philadelphia actresses (Charlotte Northeast, Amanda Schoonover, and recently, Grace Gonglewski) spending significant amount of stage time in the nude. But each could rely on a proscenium or stage lighting (or both) to create distance and thereby minimize their exposure. Moreover, given their Barrymore Award nominations and (mostly) Equity salaries, their high-risk performances carried an equivalent high reward.

But what Philadelphia actor, even during the Fringe Festival, would sit fully nude, in stark lighting, straddled over a folding chair five feet away from 20 strangers in the washroom of a public toilet?

The exhausted actors head upstairs

Exhausted by the justice of her claims, Drakou collapsed internally, and Jason then poured a bucket of water over her head and scrubbed her body with soap before clothing her.

The director granted relief to the audience by having Jason march Medea up the stairs to a landing. We followed, to see him lament his loss with a lifeless child's doll— one that spoke electronically when prodded— before wheeling Medea off in a wheelchair.

In the Euripides version, Medea is banished, offered safe haven by King Aegeus of Athens after carrying out her presumably justifiable deed. In Müller's modern work, she goes to an insane asylum— along with Andrea Yates and Dena Schlosser, modern women who drowned or killed their children and now faced similar fates.

After being overwhelmed by not only the simplicity of this production (including the toilet setting) but Drakou’s psychologically devastating performance by Drakou, I said to myself (and to Drakou afterward), “I can't think of a single theater in Philadelphia willing to stage a work like this.” The Wilma— before it had 300 seats to fill and a multi-million dollar budget to sustain— used to venture performances like this. But for now, I’ll have to keep travelling overseas to see theater this disturbing again.