A Certain Person denies falling asleep Tuesday night during the UCLA production of Medea, but that’s only the beginning of our disagreements. After it was over, he called it, “Rubbish,” which is not fair.
Granted, Annette Bening did not succeed in being truly frightening, and without a scary Medea, the play doesn’t make any sense. Euripides doesn’t provide much of a story, just scenes of outrage and confrontation, interspersed with moments of gruesome horror. The whole thing depends on Medea being Lady MacBeth10. If you have to ask “Why is she upset?” the game is lost.
But I refuse to dismiss any halfway serious attempt to stage Euripides. I like that director Lenka Udovicki provided an actual singing chorus, though maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to make them look and act like the ninja girls in Kill Bill 1.
Mary Lou Rosato stole the show as the seen-it-all chorus leader. The translation by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael followed the fashionable practice of alternating chunks of Attic/Modernist strangeness with outbursts of contemporary slang. The words were disturbing, if the sights and sounds only managed to be jarring.
Is this a picture of Medea? Im really curious we have the same one in our house.
Posted by: Medea | December 08, 2009 at 10:18 PM