Sarin Monae West as the title character in Red Bull Theater’s production of Medea: Re-Versed. Photo by Carol Rosegg
As some of my readers know, I’m a long-time board member of Red Bull Theater (no relation to the energy drink), a classical company with a particular focus on the Elizabethans and Jacobeans and, more generally, on plays from any era written in heightened language. Among my favorite productions Red Bull has mounted were: John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and an adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector. We also do regular readings and workshops—last year we mounted an entire festival of such, readings and workshops including new plays like Jacob Ming-Trent’s How Shakespeare Saved My Life and Liz Duffy Adams’s Or, What She Will and classics like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, and Euripides’s Medea.
All of which is to say that if you live in the New York area and love theater, you should know Red Bull. But whether you know about us already or not, you should know that our current show, running at the Sheen Center Shiner Theater through October 13th, has already entered my personal pantheon of favorite Red Bull shows as well as my list of favorite shows of the year.
That show, presented by both Red Bull and Bedlam and co-produced by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, is Medea: Re-Versed, a hip-hop, battle-rap retelling of Euripides’s tragedy that is exceptionally faithful to the ancient character and story delivered in an entirely contemporary idiom with the verbal virtuosity that should command the respect of any classical theater aficionado. The play was written by Luis Quintero, who also plays the role of the emcee (the equivalent in this show of the Greek coryphaeus or chorus leader), was co-conceived and directed by Nathan Winkelstein, and stars Sarin Monae West who is absolutely shattering as the title character, a mortal woman with the blood of gods and titans in her veins. The show had a run this summer outdoors under the HVSF tent, and it was excellent there, but in the intimate indoor space of the Sheen Center it has really found a whole other level of energy and emotional power. I cannot recommend it too highly: go, see it.
Why, though? The play opens, interestingly, with the emcee posing the question of why any of us are there. Why would we pay to see a tragedy? Is this what we think of as entertainment? What kind of sickos are we if so? Aristotle thought there was something medically beneficial about releasing the extreme feelings of pity and terror that tragedy inspires, but, as the emcee asks, if this myth is based on something true that happened, isn’t there something ghoulish about our deriving benefit from play-acting their suffering?
These are questions that, I think, should resonate for a contemporary audience, tangled as we are in our own deeply confused nostrums about ethics and art. I’m a big believer in the power and importance of tragedy, but it’s a rare thing on the contemporary stage. I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time I saw a new play that partook truly of the tragic spirit, it made audiences viscerally uncomfortable. I don’t think that’s just because of the subject matter of that play; I think it’s because it didn’t offer us a comfortably reformist stance from which to understand the suffering we saw. The common contemporary assumption is that we’re supposed to witness suffering in order to move us to action to end that suffering, whether that action is personal (changing our behavior) or political (changing the laws and norms of society). But this assumption is fundamentally contrary to the very idea of the tragic, bound up as it is with the idea of fate, something one cannot simply act to end (indeed, acting to avoid fate is, tragically, often precisely what brings that fate about).
Euripides is, I think, more vulnerable to being tampered with than, say, Sophocles, in order to fit his work into that contemporary meliorist framework, because he reads to us as an incipient humanist. But his incipient humanism remains tragic, which is what connects him to Shakespeare, the inventor of modern, humanist tragedy in English. So one thing I particularly appreciated about Medea: Re-Versed is that it didn’t answer the emcee’s question by turning away from the tragic and towards the didactic, didn’t send us out of the theater thinking: wow, Jason was a dick and if men weren’t such dicks then none of this would have happened. Jason was a dick, of course, and he suffers horribly for it, and every character on stage makes choices that they are responsible for. But everything they do also feels right, not only to them but to us. That sense of wholeness, of appropriateness, of rightness ending in horror is at the heart of the experience of tragedy, which is an experience of greatness. I am enormously glad, therefore, that the playwright—and the emcee—didn’t try to provide the audience with an answer to what this suffering means, but let the play itself answer his own question, by working its painful, powerful medicine on the audience.
I’ve been a fan of and an advocate for this show all through the development process, so I’m as conflicted as I could be about something that I didn’t actually write or direct. So if you don’t want to take my word for it, read Sara Holdren’s review in Vulture or Paola Bella’s review at Stage and Cinema to reassure yourself before running to buy a ticket. But then go, run to buy a ticket, before it’s too late. Lights this bright burn out fast, and theater is something you have to see while it happens, because before you know it, it’s gone.
Medea: Re-Versed runs at the Sheen Center Shiner Theater through October 13th.