MOTHER LOVE.(Medea)(Theater Review)

If Medea were tried on Court TV today, would we forgive her? Would the psychiatrists and feminists called to the stand in her defense try to justify her crime--the murder of her two young sons--by attributing it to postpartum depression or to the "oppression" of her callous and unavailable husband? We've met a few Medeas in recent years, at least in the news: Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, Marybeth Tinning--three women found guilty of killing their own children. And each has had a "reason" for her behavior: a violent boyfriend, depression, hysteria, so-called weird feelings. By murdering their progeny, these mothers, in a sense, murdered themselves. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of infanticide, besides the actual death of the child, is the way the act tears apart our sentimental view of motherhood.

As much a social responsibility as an emotional one, motherhood is synonymous with safety, order, and the keeping of secrets: we tell our mothers who we are long before we tell the world. But what if your mother has no desire to listen? What if her interests supersede the concerns of the tiny life that is counting on her to negotiate the universe? Part of what makes Euripides' "Medea" (which has been adapted and staged by Alfred Preisser, the artistic director and co-founder of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, at the Harlem School of the Arts) such a complex and enduring work is its subtext: Medea's rage may stem, in part, from the fact that she has been forced to grow up. Becoming a mother has not dulled her desire to be an adored little girl herself, rewarded for her cleverness with the place of honor in Daddy's lap. Medea, as played here by April Yvette Thompson, is a familiar type--the woman who claims to be staying in an abusive marriage because her children need a father. Actually, what such a mother needs--what Medea needs--is a father to love her. Her children are secondary to that.

Before following Jason to Corinth, where Euripides' drama is set, Medea did many things for her lover. She disabled the dragon that kept watch over the Golden Fleece. And, as she explains here, "I willingly deceived my father. Left my home; / With you I came to Iolcus by Mount Pelion, / Showing much love and little wisdom. There I put / King Pelias to the most horrible of deaths / By his own daughters' hands, and ruined his whole house." Now Medea lives for the moral superiority that comes from having sacrificed everything for her love, never understanding that the reason she committed such valiant and heinous acts was in order to turn Jason into the kind of strong man she had always dreamed of possessing, and whose importance would be reflected onto her. In that regard, Euripides--like Flaubert and Proust--shows that romantic love almost never has anything to do with the beloved's objective worthiness. Jason is simply a vessel for Medea's fierce longings. In a sense, she doesn't know him at all.

In Corinth, Jason (Lawrence Winslow) wants to put the past behind him. To curry political favor--for himself and for his family--he leaves Medea for Princess Glauke, King Kreon's daughter. Kreon is aged and wise and unsentimental, at least as the great Earle Hyman plays him here. But Medea's anger at being abandoned by Jason finds a target in Kreon's rule, and eventually he decides that her desire for spectacle is too much: he orders her to leave Corinth, whose calm and stability are hard-won.

What recourse is left to Medea? Vengeance against this society of men that will not make her its First Lady. She will rob Jason of his fatherhood, leaving him without a legacy, as he has left her without an identity. Thompson's Medea wears a red dress--the color of the blood that she has spilled and will spill, the color of the poisoned blood that courses through her own veins. The childishly petulant Medea cannot, despite Jason's pleas, be reasonable. Winslow makes it clear to the audience why Jason has left her. His large, sculpted, grounded presence gives way before her steady stream of invective. Winslow's Jason wants to be practical and ...