Luis Quintero’s Medea Re-Versed is the most inspired new classical adaptation I’ve seen onstage in years. It’s also the funnest night of theater I’ve had so far this season. If that sounds peculiar—given that we’re talking about literature’s most famously horrifying story about a woman who murders her kids to get back at a faithless husband—you’ve got the basic marvel here. Quintero has reimagined Euripides’s disturbing drama as an exhilarating hip-hop concert tragedy, scripting it entirely in rap lyrics, presiding over it himself as an emcee coryphaeus (chorus leader), and, most impressive, characterizing the protagonist with remarkably vivid empathy, humor, and detail that make Medea’s sense of entrapment feel utterly contemporary.
This co-production of Red Bull Theater and Bedlam, which started as an outdoor show at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival this summer, has been extended until next weekend at The Sheen Center Frank Shiner Theatre on Bleecker St. Everyone should see it. There’s a crack 3-piece band (guitar, bass, beatboxer), constant dynamic interaction with the audience to the infectious beat, splendid acting and singing (the set songs are show-stoppers), delectable perceptions along with the jokes in the zinger rhymes, plus it’s all over in 100 minutes.
Sarin Monae West gives a breakout performance as Medea. Tall, muscular, and wrapped tightly in an off-white tunic dress with shaved skull-sides and long braids anchored in a tight top-bun, she easily channels the character’s exotic allure and elemental power while also showing touching vulnerability in her marital-spat scene with Jason. He is played seriocomically by Stephen Michael Spencer as an arrogant and conceited dope half a foot shorter than her, an entitled white boy she may be sorry she ever met but now has to outmaneuver. Here’s a snippet of his self-introduction to give you the flavor:
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 us
On clay pots.
The director Nathan Winkelstein has restaged the action smartly and fluidly for the intimate thrust stage at the Sheen Center, where no one is more than 30 feet from the performers. This production is sexy and sad, clever and dumb all at once, without ever sacrificing one for the other. It’s also startlingly faithful to Euripides. Just go.
Photo: Carol Rosegg
By Luis Quintero, adapted from Euripides
Directed by Nathan Winkelstein
Sheen Center Frank Shiner Theatre
Comments