KABUKI MEDEA
at Cafe Voltaire
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Treating a classic tale in popular Kabuki style, Shozo Sato achieves the brooding stillness of a painting. His florid hybrid of East and West employs ritual dance, painted faces, mimed combat, a musical score punctuated by wooden beaters, and bright, sumptuous costumes attended to by masked koken. Behind the actors’ lines are grand gestures: Medea crossing her eyes when she reads the paper of divorce or sticking out her tongue in a moment of unbridled rage. The stylized acting makes use of frequent sighs, groans, and screams and an inflected cooing that pounces on key words. In Medea and Jason’s delicate courtship dance, their hands mirror each other’s movements and their diaphanous gowns create a swift sexual swirl. It’s both formalized ritual and spontaneous combustion.
Repeating her triumph of nine years ago, Barbara Robertson offers the same demure, dangerous Medea. She deserves a patent for her power to persuade; under her character’s ceremonial gowns, pancake makeup, and exaggerated facial expressions lies a cunning, angry woman who can laugh and cry in the same breath. When, echoing a cruel remark of Jason’s, she screams, “Our marriage never existed!” we know she’s capable of anything. Whether draped in the golden sashes she weaves into a magic gown or engulfed by demons who bathe her in the gore of her dead children, this reptilian Medea is the center of her own spell; her infanticide (of smiling dolls manipulated with frightening realism by the koken) is the act of a robot woman with no power over her hate.
Compared to his melodramatic travesties Stage Blood and The Mystery of Irma Vep, Ludlam’s Medea is strangely subdued, daring but faithful to the plot (here nicely compressed into 50 minutes) and relatively free of flippancy. Above all it’s a vehicle for whoever plays Medea.
Outwardly as outrageous as any of Ludlam’s spoofs, Cyclops is actually much less ambitious or original. As satire it’s thin gruel, merely transplanting the Pentagon’s atavistic gays-in-the-military policy to Greek times. And it’s easy to read it the wrong way; the satyrs don’t regret losing their sexuality and an unenlightened Odysseus remains a straight arrow. It’s hard to find a point of view here, let alone the authors’ intent. What you do get is a frenetic frat show that seems nastier than it is.
