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"The busiest, big-hearted, low budget theatre in San Diego..."
Anne Marie Welsh |
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Translated by Dr. Marianne
McDonald
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John DeCarlo (Jason) is happy to be returning to 6th@penn's stage. He was last seen here in a Tonic production of Little Eyolf. John has also appeared on such stages as Cygnet; New Village Arts; Cygnet; North Coast Rep; Diversionary; Onstage playhouse; PowPac; Lyceum; Palomar College; Patio Playhouse; Coronado; and Scripps Ranch Theater. John would like to thank Dani for everything she does and to Dyllan.
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Steven Jensen (Creon) was seen at 6th at Penn Theater last spring, in the ensemble of The Oresteia. He appeared in The Tempest with the Poor Players and most recently in the New Village Arts summer production of Julius Caesar. Other recent projects included singing in the choruses of six operettas at Lyric Opera San Diego and moving his daughter into her freshman college dorm. |
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John Martin (Aegeus) Last seen in Bronze at 6th @ Penn and in Diversionary Theater's production of It's a Fabulous Life. Roles include, Gloria Swansong in Diversionary Theater’s production of Friends of Dorothy, with which he co-wrote, Fred in Kiss Me Kate, Norman in The Dresser, Charlie Brown in You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, Edward Rutledge in 1776, and The Ghost of Christmas Present, in A Christmas Carol, with the late John Carradine. Film’s include featured roles in Happy Hour, with Rich Little and Jamie Farr, and Return of The Killer Tomatoes, with George Clooney. |
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Darlene Cleary (Nurse) is pleased to be returning to 6th @ Penn since her role of Nurse to Phaedre in Hippolytos in 2003. Other favorite plays she has appeared in are, Hamlet, Picnic, All My Sons and Steel Magnolias. She is thankful to be cast and working once again. |
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Joseph Dionisio (Tutor/Messenger) Medea is Joseph's first production with 6th@Penn. He recently received his B.A. in Theatre from UC San Diego where he performed in Asian American Theatre Experiment, The Near East, Twelfth Night, The Beard of Avon, and HAIR. Other San Diego credits include My Fair Lady (CCT), Much Ado About Nothing (Patio Playhouse), and Figments. Love and thanks. |
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Allison Finn (Chorus) is excited to make her debut at 6th @ Penn. Favorite shows include Patio Playhouse's Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank - Aubrey Award), The Tin Soldier at NCRT, The Effect of Gamma Rays… at PowPAC (Tillie), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the Old Globe. Allison attends Westview High School, where she is heavily involved with theatre and improv, and has worked with the NCRT Theatre School for six years. This summer, Allison was one of 65 rising high school seniors chosen nationwide to study at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Summer Seminar. Previously, she has trained at the La Jolla Playhouse and California State Summer School for the Arts. |
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Production Staff |
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Dr. Marianne McDonald (Translator): Professor of Theatre and Classics in the Department of Theatre at the University of California, San Diego, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a recipient of many national and international awards. Her published books include: Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible (Centrum Press, 1983), Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage (Columbia University Press, 1992); Sing Sorrow: Classics, History and Heroines in Opera (Greenwood, 2001); and The Living Art of Greek Tragedy (Indiana University Press, 2003); with J. Michael Walton: Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedies (Methuen, 2002); and The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (2007). Her performed translations include: Sophocles’ Antigone, dir. Athol Fugard in Ireland (1999); Euripides’ Children of Heracles (2003); Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus (2003-4); Euripides’ Hecuba, 2005, Sophocles’ Ajax, 2006, Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Bacchae, 2006; and Aeschylus’ Oresteia, 2007; versions and other works: The Trojan Women (2000); Medea, Queen of Colchester (2003), The Ally Way (2004); …and then he met a woodcutter (Best play of 2005), Medea: The Beginning, performed with Athol Fugard’s Jason: The End (2006); and The Last Class (2007). http://www.mmcdonald.info. |
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Ruff Yeager (Director/Sound Design/Set Design) is the Artistic Director of Vox Nova Theatre Company, a collaborative workshop for theatre artists he founded with an emphasis on the playwright and new works for the stage. His San Diego directing credits include Bronze, [sic] (Sledgehammer Theatre); Friends of Dorothy, Bent, Something Cloudy Something Clear (Diversionary Theatre); Closer (Backyard Productions); Stage Directions, A Man of His Word (Playwrights Project). His recent awards include two KPBS Pattes for Outstanding Direction (Bronze) and Outstanding Original Music (Tongue of a Bird), a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Play (Bronze), and a Playbill Award for Best New Play (Losing Mother). He will direct Medea for Sixth@Penn in the fall in a new translation by Dr. Marianne McDonald and his newest creation, A Christmas Carol: Tiny Tim’s Brand New Musical will be produced by Vox Nova Theatre Company at Sixth@Penn Theatre this holiday season. |
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Jamie Lloyd (Costume Designer) has put together various character costumes which include, Mary Poppins, Lucy and Ricky, Marilyn Monroe & Kennedy, Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean, Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, South Park and Gilligan's Island. She is currently working on costuming the upcoming 6th @ Penn production of Anton in Show Business. |
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Ian Radcliffe (Set Construction) has now built and helped design several sets for 6th @ Penn and is a part of the family. |
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Dale Morris (Producer) |
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Medea is every philandering husband’s nightmare. She is a woman who is rejected when her husband has made his fortune. As a foreigner, she is “inconvenient.” Jason wants a trophy wife in recognition of his achievements. But Medea strikes back and her vengeance is operatic. Many operas, in fact, are written about her. Euripides’ Medea, written in 431 BC, is still passionately alive today, and few plays since have so captured the imagination of audiences. It shows a heroine who takes the most awful revenge imaginable on her enemy and gets away scot-free. It is often performed to represent the consequences of someone oppressed fighting back. Did she go too far? Medea is a Homeric hero. Like Achilles, her honor is paramount. She will not have her enemies laugh at her. But, in spite of possessing magical powers, she is a total woman and mother. She will suffer the rest of her life for the losses that she has inflicted on both herself and her husband. Medea loved her husband once. Her love has turned to hate, and she claims that passion is stronger than her reason. She is not insane, but passionately motivated to pay her husband back whatever the cost. She is a woman who loves and hates with her whole being. Medea was the first terrorist. Is Medea’s crime Medea’s glory? What happens to Jason, after Medea kills his children and destroys his future in Corinth? Some people say that Medea didn’t love her children. Nonsense! It was through understanding of that love that she knows how to hurt Jason, because she knows how much he loves them. They are his future. Every Greek husband prays for sons, and not to marry Medea. Jason uses the language of sophists (philosophers who sold rhetorical skill so that their students could win arguments whether right or wrong: see Aristophanes’ play on this subject, The Clouds). But Jason is not simply evil. Greek tragedy always presents two sides to everything. The ancient audience probably believed he sincerely meant to benefit Medea and the children. He does not understand that that “benefit” is not what Medea wants. She totally rejects it on grounds of honor and for emotional reasons. Jason uses his brain; Medea, her heart. Modern audiences feel little sympathy for Jason at the beginning. Later, after Medea kills the children, there is sympathy for Jason. A divorce would have been SOOO much simpler! But not for Medea. She was out for blood. Mikis Theodorakis in his opera Medea (1991) gives wonderful poignant arias to Jason to let us understand his suffering at the end. And if we read Euripides closely, he agrees. Euripides has created one of the greatest portraits of a woman in drama. Medea gets her vengeance and escapes. However, she can escape from everyone but herself. Here lies the tragedy for her. Euripides has truly sung a new song about a woman, and it has never been surpassed.
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by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Monique Gaffney is an
extraordinary actress. She proved it two years ago at 6th
@ Penn Theatre when she played the young lady from Rwanda in the
awkwardly titled but extraordinarily moving genocide play, I
Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady
from Rwanda. She proves it again in 6th
@ Penn’s current production of Euripides’ Medea, this
time as the perpetrator rather than the victim of unspeakable
horrors — but equally complex, human and even sympathetic in her
portrayal of the founding member of the First Wives Club, driven
to a terrible revenge by her husband Jason’s leaving her for a
younger, prettier and (above all) richer woman. Just about everybody knows
the story of Medea, the terrifying sequel to the heroic tale of
Jason and the quest he led in the ship Argo to sail from
Greece to Colchis (in modern-day Turkey) to steal the Golden
Fleece. Only the ancient Greeks could have taken such a stirring
piece of teenage boys’ fiction, complete with a dashing young
hero, exciting supernatural menaces and the woman who falls in
love with him, helps him and goes with him to Greece — a story
that found its greatest dramatist in special-effects genius Ray
Harryhausen’s 1958 film Jason and the Argonauts — and
stuck such a relentlessly dark postlude on it: Medea, cut off
from home and family, abandoned by the man she betrayed them
for, killing not only Jason’s new wife but her father, King
Creon, and her own (and Jason’s) two children. And just about everybody
in Euripides’ original audience 2,500 years ago knew the story,
too. Until the 18th
century, you didn’t go to the theatre or read a book to be
surprised. You went to hear a familiar tale re-told and to
absorb the current author’s “spin” on it, what he would choose
to emphasize, what attitude he would take towards the familiar
characters and situations. Of the great Greek playwrights,
Euripides’ reputation in his own time was as the edgiest, the
one most likely to jolt you with a fresh “take” on a story you
thought you knew. If you wanted to see the ancient myths
dramatized straight-up, you went to Sophocles. If you wanted to
see them twisted and turned round, Euripides was your man. Just
as he turned the Trojan War’s “bad guys,” from the Greek point
of view, into sympathetic figures in his play The Trojan
Women, in Medea he went out of his way to make her
actions seem not only understandable but inevitable. It’s hard to think of
another play that went so far to evoke real pathos in his
characterization of a murderer until William Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth 2,000 years later — and it’s hardly even been
attempted since. Medea lives as both play and metaphor
precisely because it seems so timely; it’ll be out of date when
men stop having mid-life crises and dumping their wives, and the
dumped women stop feeling bitterness and hate towards the men
who once loved them. Its continuing relevance came home in 1994
when Susan Smith drowned her own two children to ingratiate
herself with a new boyfriend who was also her boss (and
Republican politicians blamed her actions on 1960’s liberalism)
while Diana Rigg was starring on Broadway in a production of
Medea, which proved that infanticide was a problem that well
pre-dated the existence of the Democratic party. 6th
@ Penn has given Medea an intensely stylized production,
so strikingly reminiscent of Sledgehammer Theatre’s style it’s
not at all surprising that director/designer Ruff Yeager has
worked there — albeit in one of Sledgehammer’s more “normal,”
though still edgy, productions, his own play Bronze. The
translation by Dr. Marianne McDonald (who dramatized her own
life at 6th
@ Penn in the unforgettable The Last Class) falls easily
off the tongues of the actors without being overly colloquial.
Yeager’s set design is all white: a back wall consisting of five
white doors through which the characters, other than Medea,
enter and exit; a surface on which are projected deliberately
sentimental pictures of children and words representing Medea’s
innermost thoughts; and a series of tables with large glass
bowls on and under them, into and out of which Medea pours
various substances representing the rituals of her homeland. One of the key aspects of
Medea is the central character’s rootlessness. In a
country built by people who were relocating for economic
opportunity or to flee religious persecution, we take uprooting
yourself from your home and moving somewhere else so routinely
it’s hard for us to relate to the ancient Greeks’ obsession with
home, their sense that exile was literally a fate worse than
death (indeed, given the choice of exile or death, Socrates
chose death). It’s one of the reasons why Medea, already
“homeless” in this broader sense because she betrayed her family
and killed her brother Absyrtus to help Jason, and alienated
from the natives of his town of Corinth because of her
“outsider” status, not only loses her husband but what little
identity she had as a Corinthian. Ordered into exile, driven mad
by multiple rejections, it’s no wonder she strikes back in the
ways she does. Yeager heightens Medea’s
alienation by casting African-American Gaffney in the role and
making all the other characters white. This isn’t your usual
“non-traditional” or “trans-racial” casting, in which we see
Black actors playing the parents of white ones (or vice versa)
and we’re supposed to be P.C. enough to suspend disbelief and
accept it — not from a director who carefully cast his own play
Bronze to bring out the racial politics he’d written into
his script. Medea is a Black woman in an all-white world — not
only the other people but her entire surroundings are white —
and Yeager’s casting strategy brings out her “outside” position
better than the dialogue, even from a master like Euripides,
ever could. The other standout in the
cast is John DeCarlo as Jason: stupid, befuddled, almost
Bush-like in his utter non-relationship to reality, especially
when he tries to explain to Medea how his dumping her for the
king’s daughter actually strengthened her position in the
Corinthian court. One can imagine DeCarlo as the heroic Jason of
the Golden Fleece tale gone to seed and settled into a
swaggering middle-age that still has something of the eternal
adolescent about it. Allison Finn as the Chorus — in Greek
drama, a single person who narrated the story and clarified the
moral lesson the playwright hoped we would draw from it — is
also touching. She starts her role from a seat in the second row
(explaining a “Reserved” sign that’s enigmatic until we hear her
speak) and, in McDonald’s adaptation, gets to interact with the
characters and try to talk Medea out of murdering her children.
Finn projects a voice of reason in a play that badly needs one. Steven Jensen’s Creon
works as an implacable figure of authority; he can’t do much
more with the role, but probably nobody else could have either.
Darlene Cleary as the children’s nurse is properly venerable,
wise and impotent. John Martin plays Aegeus, who offers to take
Medea in if she can get to his home town of Athens, a bit
too queeny to be believable as a righteous monarch and family
man. Joseph Dionisio is listed in the cast as “Tutor” and
“Messenger” but is costumed so boyishly at first it seemed as if
he were collectively representing Medea’s two children. But it’s Gaffney’s performance that dominates. There’s a bit of a miscalculation early on in which she’s describing how she plans to kill Jason’s relatives and she starts sounding like the Wicked Witch of the West pondering how she’s going to dispatch Dorothy. But otherwise her performance is searing and brilliant, keeping the fires banked, the volcano smoldering, through much of the first half of the play. Gaffney is a good enough actress to pass up the temptation to overact the early scenes so that, when the time comes for her to blow, the explosion is a galvanic surprise even though we know the story and are waiting for it to come. When she contemplates the murder of her children, she dances and stomps animalistically around the stage as if reverting down the evolutionary ladder; when she finally confronts Jason after the dirty deeds, she’s calm and implacable, the fury spent but annealed into a hard, bitter kernel of contempt. Yeager’s production is
full of projections, dire bits of music (much of it sounding
like Balinese gamelans, which works surprisingly well),
distorted voices at the beginning and the end (we hear Medea
this way through a recording well before Gaffney speaks her
first lines “live”), eerie lighting effects (lighting director
Mitchell Sinkovski smoothly integrates his work into Yeager’s
non-realistic conception) and stylized movements. There are
scenes in which several actors talk at once, sometimes
contrapuntally and sometimes in unison, reminding us of how many
composers have written operas or ballets about Medea (among them
Charpentier, Cherubini, Mayr, Barber, Chávez and Theodorakis). Medea at 6th
@ Penn is as good as local theatre ever gets, if not better.
It’s a stylized production, but the stylization serves the story
instead of taking it over or getting in the way. It showcases a
brilliant performer in the title role but still manages to work
as a unified production instead of just a star turn. The
combination of Gaffney’s intensity, Yeager’s thoughtful
direction and McDonald’s deep understanding of Greek drama and
how to bring it to life for a modern audience make this Medea
a production to be treasured — and not to be missed. Medea plays through Sunday, November 11 at 6th @ Penn Theatre, 3704 Sixth Avenue near Pennsylvania in Hillcrest, through June 17 and 18, respectively. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thurs., Fri. & Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun. For tickets and other information, visit www.sixthatpenn.com, e-mail tickets@6thatpenn.com, or phone (619) 688-9210.
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