ARTS REVIEW: ANNETTE BENNING - 'MEDEA'

Greek Tragedy Takes Complex Ideas to the Los Angeles Stage

By: Clare Elfman

September 26, 2009

(September 27th 2009 in Hollywood, CA) – Medea was first presented by Euripedes in 431 B.C.  Medea, using her magical skills, has helped Jason make his conquests and, in gratitude, he marries her. They have two sons…but Jason gets a better offer. He can marry the beautiful young daughter of King Creon. Ambition tempts him and he chooses the rich, young wife. Didn’t we see it in a Greek-like tragedy in A Place in the Sun, where an ordinary working guy falls in love with a rich and beautiful woman, but he’s stuck with the pregnant, ordinary girlfriend who will try to keep him from this wonderful once-in-a-lifetime chance at happiness? Oh, tormented heart. We understand his anguish. His only recourse is murder. Medea is in the same terrible position. After everything she’s done for her husband, he casts her off for a younger woman. She wants revenge!

Now to the Freud Playhouse stage and Medea, produced by UCLA Live. And a grand stage it is. Huge, slightly tilted space covered with sand. A great wall, behind which we see a telephone pole — that sets our time. On the beach roams and fumes a bag lady, hitting her fists against the wall in her madness. Onto the sand comes the Greek chorus — a bunch of kids in black leather — telling us what’s happening here, that Medea has been cast aside by her ambitious husband, and we see her two sweet boys playing on the sand. All credit to the brothers Logan (Karlen and Jacob, 8 and 12) for their stage presence. When their mother finally appears, we know the heart of the problem. Medea is the older wife losing out to a younger second wife.  We understand the anguish of her heart.

Annette Bening enters wearing a  great trailing, wildly colored skirt. She casts off (or tears off) her hair and stands with cropped hair, arms wide, with body gestures and good voice, she commands the stage. We feel her anguish. She is alone, no family to help her. Her husband has deserted her, and that very day, she is banished.

Jason enters, an animal-like creature (Angus MacFadyen), all woolly and upset, ready to put the blame on his wife for not going along with the system and letting the guys do their thing. Creon has offered his daughter. This will give Jason power and he may be able to provide for Medea and their sons. Medea only needs to be “womanly,” just go along with her husband’s plan. This she is not going to do.

To this point, Annette Bening has the stage and the story well in hand. Creon, the king, comes to tell her to get leave that day. She begs for more time. He kindly grants it and we sense that she has, in her heart, a plot for revenge. Her husband is not getting away without pain. This is a timeless dilemma, and to this point, Bening still has Medea and us in her furious hands.

What should happen is that we understand her plight and, with her, suffer her terrible choice. She will get her vengeance through the children. She will kill the sons Jason loves. What should happen is that we feel the horror and the anguish of a mother who loves her children but is consumed with the need for revenge.

We’ve seen this story over and over again in today’s news: mother drowns her sons; mother, in her madness, kills her small children. So many murders by deranged mothers, and each time, it tugs painfully at the heart. At that point in the drama, I should have been, myself, consumed in anguish, suffering with her over the terrible deed. Remember Sophie’s Choice? How terrible to have to choose which of her two children will live, which will die? Total heart-wrench.

But something happens on the Freud stage, or doesn’t happen. It seems as if the translation begins to falter. She makes up her mind, changes her mind, she loves her sons, must kill her sons…suddenly, we become disengaged from the anguish and merely wait for what will happen. The translation, trying to remain true to the details of the story, seems to lose its emotional center.

When the plot finally unfolds its horrific ending, it is all plot and not tortured heart. The two boys bring a gift to the new bride, who is actually willing to take them in. The gift is a poisonous dress which consumes her and her father. It all happens in a flash and so quickly that you say, “Hey, what happened here?”

At a peak moment, when Medea carries the bodies of her two dead sons, I should have been in tears…and I wasn’t.

Annette Bening was Medea and could have been Medea to the end, had the script allowed her, or had the staging allowed her. Suddenly, instead of  portraying the anguish of a tormented heart, she was dragging her dead children on a sled and then carrying a sled of fire which was to represent her return to the magical world. From the standpoint of good well-paced drama, it didn’t quite work.

For Medea, I saw two-thirds of a really moving, dramatic performance, and then a big miss. I wanted my heart to break for her in her terrible decision, and I became detached from the emotional center of the play.

But the attempt was a bold one. Bening is great when she’s allowed by the lines and by the action to  play out the tormented heart of the story. Jason was, early on, a convincing husband still emotionally tied to a wife yet faced with the temptation of a better offer. Creon (Daniel Davis) was an imposing king. The chorus darted about and shared information as a chorus should.

The music was engaging, the Liam Ensemble playing early instruments, music composed and nicely complementing the action by composer Nigel Osborne.

Greek tragedy has been translated to the stage and screen by American writers and our best dramatic actors: Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman presented the torment of Willy Loman, the heart of tragedy in the Greek sense. Tennessee Williams in Orpheus Rising, played so wonderfully, so tragically by Marlon Brando, as The Fugitive Kind…a unique emotional experience. The point of Greek drama is to show us the passion in the human soul when torn between choices and forced to make the wrong choice — the terrible mistakes that drive toward inevitable despair and downfall.  Medea seemed to need a better translation which did not give more weight to the details of the myth and less to the true emotional struggle and the failure that is at the heart of tragedy.

Running at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse until October 18th 2009. Whether or not you find a perfect knife-turning-in-the-heart Medea, it’s a valiant production, an interesting performance. Bening would have been a really wonderful Medea if she had, in the last third of the play, been granted the lines and the pacing to do it.