Villanova Theatre's modernized "Medea'

There's really no choice about "modernizing" the classics: We have no clear idea about what ancient performance style was like, and what we do know of it— that it was staged in open-air amphitheaters with all-male casts, for example— is neither practical nor appealing in the modern theater.

Choices, therefore, must always be made. The question is whether the performance style works with the text, and whether the overall production is coherent.

That is where the current production of Medea at Villanova University goes awry. The translation, by the Scots poet Robin Robertson, is uncertain of its own direction. Some of its passages are eloquent, but stretches are ponderous, awkward and flat. Euripides himself is a trickster, ringing changes on the received classical tradition and sometimes sending it up.

How, indeed, shall we characterize this play? Is it the story of a gangster and his gun moll, as Robinson Jeffers once suggested, or is it a protofeminist tract?

With whom are we supposed to empathize here, not to say pity? Hardly with Jason, the slick-talking scoundrel and adventurer. But shall we side with Medea, who carries vengeance to the point of killing two innocent children (three, if we count the hapless Creusa)? Is this a morality play of some sort, or Grand Guignol? If the former, just what is the moral?

Sympathy for a frightwig

Euripides built this conundrum into his text. The Medea of legend is a frightwig, a witch, and so the Roman dramatist Seneca portrayed her. Euripides wants us to take a more sympathetic look at her, but without forgetting her diabolical side. Any actress portraying her must thus walk a fine line.

Villanova's Medea, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, possesses the presence and vocal authority to carry the role, but no clear conception of whom she's portraying. Nary a shadow seems to cross her brow, and when she laments she seems to be rehearsing an appearance on Oprah. When she does finally confront the business of killing the children, her emotion, though ample, is hardly connected to the character we've been watching. Wearing a Hillary-style pantsuit, as she does in one scene, doesn't help.

The problems begin in the opening scene, where the Nurse's monologue is delayed as she fiddles with a radio that cracklingly delivers the "news" (now in fact many years old) of Jason and Medea as an item out of Colchis, while a track from Henryk Gorecki's lugubrious Third Symphony unfolds in the background.

I'm guessing that the music, with its melismatic line, is somehow meant to accompany the howls of rage and anguish that issue offstage from Medea, but they couldn't be more discordant in tone or effect. The cries in any case are tepid rather than— as they should be— bloodcurdling, and they leave Danielle DeStefano's Nurse no cue for the doom they should suggest.

Talking to the floor

The eclectic, unfocused costuming continues with the other principals, with Creon (Patrick Edward White) arriving in a pukka-Sahib outfit and Jason (Chris Serpentine) in business attire. Creon sits in a folding chair while a servant delivers the news of Medea's banishment, which raises the question of why he has come at all, and Jason blusters at her as if giving a boardroom speech, making the embrace they later share unconvincing. Crushed at the end, Jason makes a respectable show of pain, but he is obliged to do it lying on his stomach and delivering his lines to the floor.

Problems afflict the chorus, too, whose garb ranges from Main Line dowager to Mediterranean peasant. The central issue, however, is in how its role has been conceived.

In general, the Greek chorus represents communal piety, but Euripides is slyly subversive here too. The women who gather at Medea's door are curious, censorious and fretful: They don't like Medea, the menacing outsider, and they're not sorry to see her get her comeuppance; at the same time, they cannot resist womanly fellow-feeling and a thrill of fear at the thought that their husbands, too, might betray them. Their feelings turn as Medea appeals for their sympathy, and then turn again as she plans to kill the children.

A chorus, or a support group?

This is a far more flexible and morally nuanced use of the chorus than the Greek stage was accustomed to, and the women's changes of feeling need to be subtly registered. Here, however, the chorus soon turns into a support group for Medea— more Oprah— and, when the time comes for them to register horror at her filicide, they have no room to retreat. Hey girls, I thought you were with me on this one.

To compensate for this overcommitment, the chorus tries to physically intervene in the action, beating at the doors behind which Medea is slaying her children. In this respect, Euripides maintained the fourth-wall tradition of the Attic stage, in which the chorus might comment but not act. By breaching that wall, director Shawn Kairschner poses a question he can't answer: Why does the chorus choose to act only when it is too late?

The chorus does have its moments, and Creon's herald (Nelson Barre) makes the most of his grim recital of Medea's handiwork in the royal palace. Lisi Stoessel's set design, though cluttered with lawn chairs and packaged furniture, is effective in its broad lines, and Jerrold R. Forsyth's lighting nicely suggests Medea's getaway at the end. The production tries to gin up its intensity at the end, but protracts the murder of the children (one stabbed and one, in a novel touch, strangled) to the point, if not of risibility, at least of camp.

You can do Medea as camp, do it in drag, do it as farce. Whatever you do, however, you need to make up your mind. This Medea never does.