'Medea' attacks children, attracts Yale dramatists

At the heart of Madeline's Medea, written by Stacie Lents, SY '00, and directed by Tamara Fisch, PC '00, lurks a meaty agit-prop comedy, a cunning indictment of the sexism that thrived even in Euripides' day. In ancient Greece, anger at being "the other woman" led Medea to kill her children and seek refuge from the gods. It's perhaps telling that, in the irony-laden crucible of Lents' satire on contemporary culture, the same kind of rage frequently inspires a show tune and a pop culture reference. Medea has a strong human pulse, but it's sometimes hard to find.

KATHERINE ALDRICH/YH Bright Ivy artists vs. Hollywood Barbies.

Lents has chosen a ripe target for her mythic Morality Play: the gender farm of Hollywood, where a hiked-up skirt and a vapid mind are more important than a degree from Yale Drama. Madeline (Jacquelin Sibblies, DC '03) and Carey (an amiable Alison Ahn, CC '03), two pals from back East, find themselves strangers in the Los Angeles hall of mirrors, where Madeline is set to star in a film version of Medea. In a variation on the "good girl trounced by a bad town" story, she meets the sleazoid producer King (James DuRuz, TD '03) and falls in love with director Jay (Robert McGinnis, ES '01), a nice guy caught in a bad business. Then, Madeline loses everything because she won't compromise herself to please a phallocentric culture. Faster than you can say "Girl Power," the studio is in flames from her righteous indignation. Fisch keeps the reparteé quick (sometimes a little too quick to follow) and maintains a steady stream of smooth pratfall hijinks.

In the Medea media funhouse, there are only really two types of people: morons and Yalies. Madeline and Jay show their inherent goodness in a fallen Tinseltown world by launching into one of those moments of profound collegiate affinity typical of the freshman year experience. They lament the total blah-ness of their peers, trading horror stories about Hollywood banality like "You're fired if you use the word `reify.'" They discuss a monologue at length, dissecting it like a couple of actors in a scene study class, then laugh at booby, brainless ingenue Angie (Elizabeth Newman, TD '02) when she flubs the Attic poetry and looks dumb. Throughout the play, Madeline and Carey comment on the silliness around them with a caustic precision that their straw-man rivals could never hope to equal.

The Hollywood of Medea is one in which young, well-intentioned, bright artists from the Ivy League are undermined by the machinations of young, nasty, stupid power-holders who would hand over the reins to superior minds if they knew better. (Incidentally, "stupidity" is one of the greatest insults in the production; the final, Brechtian conclusion admonishes the audience, "Do you see the points we've made/Or are you really dumb?") Intellect is more often at question here than cleavage. Lents' well-crafted critiques of male hypocrisy and female exploitation are often funny, and there's a surreal thrill in watching Kings' Barbie doll secretaries parade through the office like the Von Trapp kids, but the female exploitation angle often feels heavy-handed. Likewise, the dreamscape of Hollywood never quite gels: it plays like an amalgamation of the pre-fab film and television versions of corruption that have come to inspire their own cult mythology.

Theater

Madeline's Medea Written by Stacie Lents Directed by Tamara Fisch Fri., Mar. 31, 8 and 11 p.m. Sat., Apr. 1, 8 p.m. Whitney Humanities Center

Madeline's Medea succeeds best when it confronts and celebrates the university world that Madeline and her Yale peers must leave behind for the uncertainty of post-grad life. The cast is at its most energetic when they know they're putting on a show for an audience of appreciative compatriots. In the first hour, impresario Thomas Harvey (with wonderful Spizzwinks (?) braggadocio) chides Angie for being a "Drama School Drop-Out" in a riotous Grease parody that should be a model to any campus a cappella group. A band led by the exceptional Philip Gorman, who also composed the incidental music, jams along in the background. Likewise, the most emotionally effective moment comes towards the end, when, in a strangely unrelated counter-plot, we watch a young, college-educated woman (a theater studies major, no less) confront a banal world that has no idea how to value her. She has no choice but to sell out—and, in a few efficient scenes, we see the tragedy of young idealism meeting cruel, sexist, corporate, idiotic contemporary America. It's horrible because it's the most honest moment in the play; it's great satire because it knows exactly what it's talking about.

The final scene of the show, when the cast breaks into a concluding medley of rewritten songs from Les Miserables and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, typifies Medea. It's fun, but it doesn't cohere to the rest of the production. It has spirit and enthusiasm, but it references the insular world of theater rather than the vast spectrum of experience. Like all Athenian tragedy, Medea mourns the fall of past greatness. But, at its best, it looks to a complicated future where what you know, and who you are, doesn't guarantee the success you deserve.

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