72 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale play the doomed married couple in “Medea.”
THETHEATRE
BLOODY HELL
Twists on “Medea” and “Macbeth” reflect modern tragedies.
BYVINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
B
y the end of two shows up now—
a new “Medea,” starring Rose Byrne
and Bobby Cannavale, at BAM’s Har-
vey Theatre, and “Mac Beth,” adapted
from Shakespeare’s play and directed
by Erica Schmidt, for Red Bull The-
atre—the sheer untamable mess on-
stage might turn your mind toward lo-
gistics: Who is going to clean all this
up? And how long is it going to take?
While both audiences stood to hail the
casts, I couldn’t help but send thoughts
and prayers to the members of the crew.
“Medea”’s set is, at the start, a blank,
forbidding white, on the stage floor and
both sides of the extended proscenium.
The effect is of a huge, three-dimen-
sional whiteboard, waiting for a marker.
The background discloses no context
of time or place, or any hint of the trau-
mas to come. By the play’s end, it’s
smeared with elemental, ancient stuff:
water and ash, the inevitable blood.
The all-female cast of “Mac Beth”
makes a glorious physical and aural
mulch of the stage at Hunter College’s
Frederick Loewe Theatre; their ado-
lescent stomps and bangs and splashes
often qualify as laugh lines, fully earned.
At one point, it rains real water, sprayed
from unseen sprinklers near the ceil-
ing—the actors’ costumes go translu-
cently soggy, the air in the theatre starts
to feel tropical, and the puddles already
onstage kick up glugs of water. The
floor, which is covered in turf and loose
branches, becomes a finger-painted
Rorschach; people sitting in the front
row get thrillingly splattered as Mac-
beth’s witches boil and bubble.
That’s life: the tabula rasa, rarely so
clean to begin with, gets quickly soiled.
Both productions take “woman”—and
maybe even the ideas of gender that en-
case it—as a category and muddy it up.
And, speaking of encasements, they use
the familiar thrusts of these two dramas
as swaddling clothes for more recent
stories plucked from the news, which,
in turn, reflect the reality in long-run-
ning theatrical archetypes: the blood we
keep spilling; the methods of slaughter
that roll forward from age to age.
In “Medea,” based on Euripides’
classic, written and directed by Simon
Stone, Anna (Byrne) and Lucas (Can-
navale) are a married couple, both sci-
entists by trade, reunited when Anna
is released from a mental institution.
She was sent there after being caught
trying to gradually kill Lucas by slip-
ping trace amounts of poison into his
dinner. He’d get violently ill without
knowing why, and she’d nurse him in
bed as he trembled: a sweet alibi for
slow murder. Once confined, she was
prescribed a battery of meds and as-
signed a social worker, who appears
throughout the show as a reminder of
how, these days, bureaucracy plays at the
edges of even our most primal human
states. Returned home, Anna is anxious
to win Lucas back, but her desire is de-
lusional: this whole cycle started when
Anna found a bouquet of sexts—to
Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the young
daughter of Anna and Lucas’s boss,
Christopher (Dylan Baker)—on Lu-
cas’s phone. Now the furtive lovers live
together, and, unbeknownst to Anna,
are planning to be married.
The premise is based on the true story
of Debora Green, a Kansas City doctor
who, in 1995, during a period of marital
strife, began drinking heavily, poisoned
her husband with ricin derived from cas-
tor beans, and burned down the fami-
ly’s house, killing two of their three chil-
dren. Stone, in an act of clever dramatic
architecture, takes this tight knot of a
story (the poisoning was revealed only
after the arson and the murders) and
stretches it into an elegant causal chain.
