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The one thing most people know about Medea is that shes the one that killed her kids.
We know the show runs 75 minutes; we set our watches; 74…73…
If that kid is watching a movie, he definitely wont live to finish it.
In both cases, the important connection to the older play is the drive towards a tragic conclusion.
The connection also, of course, flatters the material.
At the beginning of StonesMedea,Anna has just gotten out of the mental hospital.
But shes better now!
Lucas was totally right to have her committed!
puts her suddenly back in control.
Cannavale overdoes it in most of the show, blustering enough for four or five different schnooks.
But in this one section the couples very different ways of moving tells us everything we need to know.
Byrne darts around him like a minnow; Cannavale turns slowly.
Why does air seem so much thicker for him?
As the show begins, a huge one lifts up, hanging like a billboard over the stage.
The rest of the set is deliberately edgeless, featureless, soft.
Bodies float there, shadowless.
We can see shes not going back to work at the lab, even if she cant.
Itsalsoclear that shes not going back to the lab because no lab like it exists.
The details Stone tosses into his script are sketchy and unconvincing, then lurid and absurd.
His 20-something-year-old daughter Clara (Madeline Weinstein) is Lucass on-and-off lover, and hes eager that they reconcile.
Get her pregnant, he says to Lucas, coarsely, so that she really knows you mean it.
Lucas is pushing 50, and hespatentlya loser.
What kind of father does this?
Its difficult to keep StonesYermaout of your head while watchingMedea.
The comparison is unflattering.
Byrne, on the other hand, is doing something skilled but much smaller.
Shes good, but shes notdistractinglygood.
And the whole around her simply isnt strong.
In bothMedeaandYerma, well-off couples with diazepam prescriptions are thrown into the pit by a womans derangement.
What is it about that formula that so draws Stone?
Of coursewewouldnt say that a woman worried about her fertility was going nutsthats just Lorca!
Andwewould never traffic in fantasies about homicidal womenthats just Euripides!
But these are new texts, written now.
Strip the titles away, and what do we have?
Elegantly designed episodes of those TV shows that reenact murders.
Call it Women On the Brink: Classics Edition.
But then turn it off.
Medeais at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 8.
