Theatre Review: Greek to Me
by Frank Episale
Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC
Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center
On paper, there are so many points of contact, so many similarities between Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts’s Medea and Its Double and International WOW Company’s Auto Da Fe that constructing a double review around them should be easy. Both were written by East Asian playwrights; both rely heavily on “physical theatre” techniques of the Western avant-garde, ranging from Viewpoints to Grotowski; both are based on or inspired by material from classical Greece; and both were directed by Columbia graduates. When I ordered my tickets for these shows, this article was already very much on my mind. Perhaps the review would begin with an interrogation of why so many theatre artists, even those half a world away, have engaged with Greek antiquity in recent years. Perhaps it would focus on one of the two obvious differences in the pieces, contrasts evident in press releases and publicity material: Medea and Its Double is a Korean production, here on tour, while Auto Da Fe has been translated into English and directed by an American; Auto Da Fe has a specific political point of view, while Medea and Its Double is an exploration of passion and violence, both psychological
and physical.
In performance, however, these two productions are such different experiences that the only real connection between them is that each needs to be taken on its own terms to be understood. Each also serves as a reminder that, however much theatre you’ve seen, and however skilled you imagine yourself to be at reading publicity material, it’s impossible to know when you buy a ticket just what you’ve
gotten yourself into.
The concept of Medea and Its Double is to split the title character literally into two parts: the (jealous) lover and the (loving) mother, thus physicalizing Medea’s internal struggle and making the narrative more about her anguish than her crimes. Director Hyoung-Taek Limb adapted the story from Euripides, but only kept a fraction of the original text. In keeping with his company’s mission, Limb and his cast incorporate elements of Viewpoints and Grotowski techniques (which he picked up while an MFA student at Columbia) as well as elements from “traditional” Korean forms ranging from martial arts to p’ansori to masked forms like t’alch’um and ogwang-dae.
I had some qualms about the show as I entered the theatre, fearing the pitfalls that might arise from what seems to me an overly simplified psychological approach. I was also concerned about the likely stylistic result of merging the various forms and techniques at play in the show. I think directors should draw on whatever tools are available to them, but this kind of cultural pastiche too often results in a watered down “universal” aesthetic that neither serves its constituent influences nor adds up to much of anything new. Finally, the title gave me pause: Why Medea and Its Double instead of Medea and Her Double?
The only reason I could think of was a play on The Theatre and Its Double, a seminal book by theatre theorist and director Antonin Artaud; as important as Artaud’s work has been for contemporary theatre, artists who go out of their way to pay homage to Artaud tend to produce theatre that is self-righteous and pretentious in the manner of a trust-fund kid turned flower child. (I will owe apologies to several friends if they read this.) Thankfully, though, most of my concerns proved unfounded. While Medea and Its Double doesn’t shed much new light on its source material, it is a moving and idiosyncratic re-envisioning of the Medea tale that draws on the specific strengths of a terrific ensemble cast.
While Medea and Its Double was advertised as a performance in Korean with English supertitles, the only text that appears in this production — the title, followed by a brief and somewhat awkward bit of exposition — is projected onto the set’s upstage scrim/wall at the very beginning of the show. The fragmented dialogue, which is indeed in Korean throughout, is untranslated. Once the text has faded, though, and the performers have taken over, cerebral objections to the production’s approach seem petty in comparison to the grace, beauty, and commitment of
this company.
A children’s game accompanied by a sing-song chant serves as a thematic and aural motif. The game sets the stage for flirtation and then seduction, as children become adolescents, and then adults. A martial-arts-like ritual signifies Medea and Jason’s first sex; their children, represented by two puppets, soon appear. Jason’s negligence and infidelity splits an enraged Medea in two, eventually leading to tragedy. The children are ultimately reduced to fragile paper cutouts, unable to withstand their mother’s rage. Candles floating peacefully on two shallow pools embedded into the stage are suddenly full of menace as the “children” are torn asunder and exposed
to the elements.
Throughout, the melody from the game reasserts itself, reminding us that the seeds of all of this — the laughter, the sex, the resentment, the murder — were planted by a deceptively playful ring of dancing, singing children. Throughout, passages of chanted narration performed p’ansori style by a singer seated behind the upstage scrim, add another layer to the onstage soundscape.
It’s impossible for me to judge the quality of Limb’s textual adaptation, but it seems clear that his work with the performers is his real accomplishment here. While the staging is reminiscent of work from Joseph Chaiken, Anne Bogart, and other luminaries of the Western avant-garde, this Medea, ultimately, is one that could only have been created by this company. That specificity, that commitment to growing a piece of theatre from the bodies and personalities of the performers rather than mapping it on to them, is what renders Medea and Its Double more than the sum of its parts.
• • •
International WOW’s Auto Da Fe also seeks a kind of theatrical synergy, but there are so many parts that the whole simply can’t keep up. This isn’t to say that there is no value in the production, only that Josh Fox, who directed with assistance from Paul Bargetto, sometimes blurs the line between artistic ambition and artistic hubris, and the grander the statement he’s trying to make, the less coherent he is.
Masataka Matsuda’s dense, difficult play is a meditation on history as an act of erasure, of creative forgetting. Set outside of time in a place called the “History Processing Center,” the play finds Odysseus (or a version of him) abandoning the battlefield and seeking a kind of peace. While publicity materials summarize the plot as Odysseus’s “return home,” Auto Da Fe doesn’t depict a return so much as a kind of retirement. To transform war into history, workers at the Processing Center shuffle papers, bathe soldiers, write articles, sing ballads, cart files, and tell stories. Little by little, the present recedes, trauma becomes mythology, and entire cultures are erased in the service of a grand narrative.
Fox and his collaborators have pulled out all the stops in their attempt to theatricalize Matsuda’s very abstract text. The cavernous Performing Arts Center at Baruch plays right into Fox’s penchant for epic stagings. Ushered into the theatre a few at a time, the audience is confronted, even assaulted, by the sheer size of the experience and the number of cast members making their way from point to point. A woman perched high above the stage lip-synchs an aria; half a dozen performers push carts and boxes along an imaginary grid, trying to keep up with the pointing fingers and shouted instructions of their supervisors. Little by little, the war theme emerges, as the audience realizes that a pile of downstage rubbish is made up of military uniforms, and that there may be bodies living and dead writhing within. All of this takes place before Odysseus has even entered the space.
My audience-mates at Auto Da Fe, which I saw on a Saturday afternoon, were nonplussed and confused. Several older people fell asleep only to be awakened by a particularly loud moment in the sound design, while the younger women to my left kept whispering things along the lines of “I don’t know what the hell this is.” This is not an unusual response to Fox, who belongs to that strain of the avant-garde that preaches populist politics and aesthetics but paradoxically creates relatively inaccessible work with a high barrier to entry. Critical response has been mixed, ranging from fawning praise to lukewarm befuddlement to righteous indignation.
My own response was a mixture of admiration and frustration. International WOW’s aesthetic ambition and political engagement remain worthy of praise, but their work remains intellectually and emotionally muddled, the result of a lack of conceptual and intellectual rigor. Fox clearly has a knack for eliciting incredible commitment from a large cast but, thirteen years after the company’s debut, and nine years since they garnered attention with one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, his work doesn’t seem to have developed much beyond its initial
(considerable) promise.
Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Production Manager: Soo-Mi You; Lighting Designer: Tae-Jin Chung; Cast: Min-Jung Kim, Kyoung Lee, See-Yeon Koo; Do-Yup Lee, Su-Yeon Lee, Kyu-Hwa Choi, Da-Il Lee. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC at The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa ETC, 74 East 4th Street, NYC through January 24th.
Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Lighting Designers: Charles Foster and Jeremy Cunningham; Set Designer: Nate Lemoine; Sound Designer: Julian Mesri; Costume Designer: Cait O’Connor; Dramaturg: Heather Denyer. Cast: Lydia Blaisdell, Adam Boncz, Mike Callaghan, Melissa Chambers, Stefani Charitou, Lisa Clair, Herbie Go, Sara Gozalo, Beth Griffith, Ikuko Ikari, Georgia X. Lifsher, Joanna Lu, Tommy Mcginn, Mary Notari,Jennifer Oda, Blaire O’leary, Martina Potratz, Brent Reams, Iracel Rivero, Pedro Rafael Rodriguez, Robert Saietta, Kristina Siapkara, Brandon Smith, Carlton Tanis, Evan True, Aya Tucker, Michael Villastrigo, Deborah Wallace, and Folami William. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC through January 24th.
