Medea

Written by Euripides

Designed, Directed and Adapted by Theodora Skipitares

La MaMa Annex

74A East 4th Street

212-475-7710

 

Review by Rayhané S. Sanders

 

A master of puppetry, Theodora Skipitares has recently gained

attention for her interpretations of the classic Greek tragedies

Trilogy and Iphigenia, re-imagined as puppet spectaculars.

Skipitares’ latest is Medea, Euripides’ timeless story of a betrayed woman who, under the direction of the gods, gambled her life for her husband, Jason, only to be abandoned by him for a younger woman.

 

Written in 431 B.C., the story is the primordial tale of marital incongruity. Most fans of Greek tragedy remember Medea as a murderer, not only of King Creon and his daughter, but of her own children. This horrifying climax does not surface in Skipitares’ version, however, as the director found in her research that the city of Corinth (where Medea, having left her Black Sea home,

was taken by Jason) actually commissioned Euripides to write this otherwise unverified account.

 

A Puppet Scorned: Life-sized figures, giant masks and other theatrics take center stage in puppeteer Theodora Skipitares’ retelling of the Greek tragedy, Medea.

 

As such, Skipitares’ heroine transforms from the definitive woman scorned to the original feminist. Likewise, the classic Greek chorus — three golden legs, topped off by the most amazing masks — serves as a pillar of tradition and a stand-in for the play’s target audience: angry women in transition from victimhood to empowerment. The feminist take on the maligned Medea is refreshing. The video work by Kay Hines, projected onto hand-fluttered silks, is impressive, and the original score by Tim Schellenbaum, full of plucky lute notes, is divine.

 

But what is most remarkable about the play is, no doubt, the puppetry. The show’s puppeteers, including Cecilia Schiller, Chris Maresca, Miriam Tabb, Prentice Onayemi and Nicky Paraiso, in a tour-de-force performance as Medea, move from hand puppets to life-size figures (cabled to the actors themselves), to small rod puppets, which, shadowed behind a screen at the stage’s center,

play through gorgeous reproductions of key plot points (Jason’s battle scene and Medea’s famed taming of one infamous dragon) in what can best be described as hieroglyphs come to life.

 

For a genre in which the gods play out their musings with the lives of mere mortals, the actors’ dramatic expression through a lifeless puppet seems an apt metaphor. Skipitares’ genius lies in understanding puppetry as an honest translation of the logic of Greek tragedy.