Before every performance of Medea Re-Versed, the play’s writer, Luis Quintero, stands at the door, welcoming the audience with exuberant high-fives and handshakes. After every performance, he bounds straight upstairs to the lobby, sweaty and still in costume — he’s also a key part of the seven-person cast — and begins a short talkback with anyone who wants to stick around. “I think theater should be more like church,†I heard him say to the group that was assembling post-show. “If I could, I’d have cookies and coffee for you.â€
Quintero’s energy, onstage and off-, is big and super-sincere, unfeignedly humble and curious, with a bubbling undercurrent of enthusiasm that’s always ready to bust through the surface. It’s pretty irresistible, and what it has generated when run through the bloodstream of one of the world’s oldest, darkest tragedies is a singular beast: a play with both viscera and humor, wit and poignancy. He has a distinctive and gutsy take on the ancient Greek conception of theater as a civic process, a place for reckoning consciously, communally, and poetically with impossible questions. “Who does it really cost for us to pay to see a tragedy?†Quintero asks in the show’s preface, where he introduces himself as our coryphaeus — leader of the chorus, or, to be true to the genre at hand, “the M.C.†With remarkable faithfulness to Euripides, Medea Re-Versed renders the more-than-2,400-year-old play into hip-hop, a series of high-octane flows and formal rap battles. There’s a beat-boxer (Mark Martin) holding down the rhythm, along with an electric guitar and bass (Siena D’Addario and Melissa Mahoney) bringing a tinge of alt-metal.
If your gimmick counter is going off, unplug it for a second — or, if you feel the ghost of a certain founding father dropping beats in the distance, let him do his thing while Medea does hers. Unlike Flight of the Conchords, Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t invent rap. And while Quintero’s project — co-conceived with the show’s director, Nathan Winkelstein — might sound a little shticky, in the flesh, it’s got legs. Sincerity and skill play a part here (Quintero really can spit a rhyme), but so does a striking cohesion between forms. The Greeks, after all, were inventing Western theater: Aeschylus’s innovation of a second actor, apart from the chorus and its leader, had been around for only about 50 years when Euripides wrote Medea, the addition of a third (!) actor for less than 30. Tragedies like these were confrontations — merciless verbal duels in which two characters plead their case, go on the attack, try to take each other apart. Or they were apostrophes — soaring solos of suffering, appeals to the gods, or vivid reportage — while the chorus looked on and offered commentary. In other words, when Jacob Ming-Trent enters in a royal outrage as Creon, the king of Corinth, and Quintero’s M.C. yields him the stage with the bars, “Let the house be quiet / No more of my words / This is Creon versus Medea / And the king speaking first … †Well, it’s Greek to me.
Ming-Trent, Quintero, and Stephen Michael Spencer make up the play’s chorus, with the tireless Spencer and Ming-Trent hopping out to take on roles as needed. Along with Creon, Ming-Trent rips into a speech of horrified and horrifying exposition as a messenger late in the play, and, on the flip side of that coin, plays a very funny Aegeus, the visiting king of Athens who’s been cursed with infertility. (A quintessential run: “Well, some god gets off on damning me / I’m in my palace plannin’ on plantin’ seed / When some deity devitalized my phallus, see, / Which makes a family for me a fallacy.â€) Spencer, meanwhile, fills Medea’s golden-boy-narcissist of a husband, Jason, with an itchy, nasty aggression thinly masked with California bro chill. “Hey babe, it’s me,†he announces, swaggering in wearing his famous fleece:
It’s your babes’ Pops —
I know this fable of ours
Ain’t an Aesop,
But babe, stop!
I don’t want this to be how they picture usÂ
On clay pots.
That’s funny shit (just wait for the “meta-terranean†joke), and it makes the play’s inevitable brutality sting with revivified surprise when it comes. Spencer is refreshingly unafraid to dig into masculinity’s ugliest places, and no one’s laughing when his Jason spits at Medea, “Why don’t you make like your slit and / Loosen up?â€Â Nor when Medea herself (the excellent Sarin Monae West, channeling Rey in her desert-Jedi–esque costume by Nicole Wee) recalls the horrors of her own story in a dark lament called “Blood and Sand†— how, among other things, she murdered and dismembered her brother so that she and Jason could escape from her home city of Colchis back to Corinth. “I can feel even now the loathing,†West’s Medea rhymes, her voice thickening as she remembers giving birth in a tent, an immigrant woman abandoned by her lover outside the walls of a xenophobic city. “Could I have said no to taking off my clothing? / I was alone, passed them through my splayed hips, and the babes / Gasping as I lay ripped / It’s a vision I keep wishing that I could erase / They had the eyes of my brother set into Jason’s face.â€
West’s performance is as contemplative as it is forceful. She anchors the story not simply by accessing the character’s rage and suffering, but by letting us watch her think. That’s key both as a reproof of Jason’s easy chauvinism (she’s “so emotional,†he claims, that she fails to see his plan to marry Creon’s teenage daughter “as logicalâ€) and, even more so, as a way to make us reckon with her eventual, infamous actions as conscious choices. Filicide appalls us so immediately and deeply that our gazes jerk to the side — we want to explain it away as madness, or at least as some fit of uncontrollable pain and passion. Euripides doesn’t allow for that, and nor does Quintero. In a program note, Quintero writes about studying the testimonies of women who have been convicted of killing their children. Why, he asks, did they feel this “was their only option, and what kind of spousal relationships fostered these outcomesâ€? Paradoxically, this insistence on Medea’s agency only amplifies the awful cosmic pull of the play’s final moments: The human chooses, and somehow, the beyond-human drain of fate still seems to suck everything away. West’s Medea arrives at a quiet, almost tender moment of revelation that slips between the ribs like an obsidian knife: “The flowers are condemned to die,†she reflects, “when you’ve forsaken Mother Earth.â€
Uptown, playwright Arlene Hutton and director Margot Bordelon are examining the ancient question of a mother’s agency — rather, a woman’s agency — from a different, agonizingly contemporary angle. Blood of the Lamb is a compact howl of a play, born of the death of Roe. The scenario it depicts, says Bordelon in her director’s note, “began as a work of speculative fiction, but [grows] closer to realism with each passing day.†Inside the bland, cramped, institutional box of the play’s set — its cheap furniture and glaring fluorescent lights well curated by Andrew Boyce — two women meet. One, Nessa (Meredith Garretson), is physically exhausted and coping with tragedy: On a flight from L.A. to New York, she has passed out, only to wake up in a hospital and find that her pregnancy has ended — the baby she’s been carrying is still inside her, but it’s no longer alive, and if the fetus isn’t removed soon, she herself could die. The other woman — crisp in a blue pants suit and cordial in that slightly bulldozer-y Southern-mom way — says she’s here to help. Her name is Val (Kelly McAndrew, nailing it) and to Nessa’s surprise, she’s not a doctor but a lawyer. “I need a lawyer?†Nessa falters, and Val’s chipper response is pure nightmare: “I’m here to represent your baby.â€
So begins a 70-minute real-time struggle between the law — draconian, constantly changing, full of holes and hypocrisies and blatant means to an end — and a woman who’s shocked to find herself on trial with no one but herself to insist on her rights, to defend her life, to make the simple statement, shocking in its necessity, that she too is a human being. Hutton has devised a situation specifically to cut through the noise, the posters of dead babies and cries of “murder,†and expose the gears of the machine — the pistons of misogyny and classist oppression pumping away beneath anti-abortion laws. She’s also come up with a way to remind people who might be flying between LAX and JFK that this horror show affects them, too. Even if they don’t end up, like Nessa, stranded in Texas and subject to its statutes, even if they’re “lucky†— to live in Brooklyn, to have insurance, to have liberal parents, to be healthy, to be white, whatever — this is still their country, our country, and women are dying in it.
“Who is this helping?†Nessa cries out at one point. The question hangs suspended in the air as Val, as she always does, pivots away. Though some of Hutton’s tactics are tinged with contrivance — Val, we discover, has an abortion hidden in her past, and she’s balancing lawyering with mothering five kids and the kind of husband to whom she eventually snaps over the phone, after plenty of cajoling, “Make your own damn breakfast!†— it’s mostly a matter of timing. Blood is trying to fit a lot into 70 minutes, and while certain aspects of plot or character might have been unfurled with a bit more elegance over a longer period, the decision to keep things brisk feels like the right one. “For all our sakes, I won’t take us long,†says Luis Quintero’s chorus leader in Medea, and spiritually, Hutton is right there with him, even as he goes on both to acknowledge our fears and to request our courage: “Now because of what the subject is / You might stress about what this subjects us to / Well let me impress upon you to keep pressing through.â€
There’s a conscious activism at work in Blood of the Lamb, an entreaty that we all listen — for just a moment, and in a moment where opinions are guarded like castles under siege — to something that dares to aspire to change minds. Before the play began, a woman down the row from me said that she knew someone who had seen the show. “She said she wouldn’t have gone,†said the woman, perhaps with just a hint of Schadenfreude, “if she’d known what it was about.†But she did go, and she stayed till the end. While no one is a literal captive at a play, there’s something about being stuck for a while in discomfort, in uncertainty, and just having to wait and — as the Greek root of theater reminds us — see. It’s a muscle we’re too apt to let atrophy, and both Hutton and Quintero are intent on exercising it.
Medea Re-Versed is at the Sheen Center through October 13.
Blood of the Lamb is at 59E59 Theaters through October 20.