MEDEA COMES TO OUR TOWN

Euripides’ murderous mama visits Thornton Wilder’s iconic New England burg in the aptly titled Medea Comes To Our Town, and if you’re a theater trivia whiz who loves the two aforementioned playwrights equally, Tony Foster’s clever mashup of their chefs-d’oeuvre will be right up your alley. I enjoyed most of it quite a lot.

Foster himself stars as The Stage Manager, not the actual behind-the-scenes stage manager (that would be Jordyn Ryan), but the all-seeing, all-knowing character who first introduced audiences to the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners back in 1938, though if you’ve never heard of that fictional New Hampshire town or the myriad other theatrical references peppered in throughout, much of Medea Comes To Our Town is likely to fly right over your head.

Not so this reviewer, who relished hearing Foster’s fabulously folksy Stage Manager expound on Wilder’s groundbreaking play, on the actor who originated the role before going on to write the screenplay for Our Town’s 1940 film version starring William Holden, and on why Theatre of NOTE favorite Alina Phelan was cast as Doctor’s Wife. (It turns out the TV star they wanted “got a film.”)

Thus begins another morning in Our Town, with Doctor’s Wife admonishing her Son (The Porters of Hellgate’s Sean Faye) and daughter (The Road Theatre Company’s Kate Huffman) to eat their breakfasts before they get cold. (As to where the Doctor is, well “he’s been out all night in Polish town, helping a cat with her kittens,” which is another Our Town reference you’ll only get if you’ve seen or read the Thornton Wilder play.)

As in Wilder’s Our Town, the Stage Manager steps into the action from time to time as local residents or visitors like the Bostonian second-hand furniture salesman interested in buying Doctor’s Wife’s Queen Ann highboy, which we’ve seen concocted before our eyes from a table and several straight-back chairs a la the Wilder original where scenery and set pieces are mostly left to our imagination.

Cut to the Stage Manager, who introduces us to Medea (the play, not the character), when and by whom it was written, when it was first performed on Broadway and starring whom, a prelude to the arrival in Our Town of none other than Medea herself (the Road’s Cherish Monique Duke), fresh from murdering her two children and accompanied by her loyal Servant (NOTE’s Lynn Odell) on a time-traveling chariot ride from ancient Greece to Our Town to The Great White Way.

Let the mash-up begin.

If it’s not already clear, plays don’t get any more meta than Medea Comes To Our Town, which is why to fully get into it, you need to know a lot about theater past and present (which I do), love classic 20th-century American plays (which I do), and enjoy Greek Tragedies (which unfortunately I don’t).

In other words, as long as Medea Comes To Our Town stuck with Thornton Wilder, this reviewer was fully on board, but less so when it was Euripides being riffed on, in particular an Act Two segment that had Faye, Huffman, Odell, and Phelan sporting Greek tragedy masks while recreating a scene from Abe Burrows’ Cactus Flower as adapted by Medea that I’d just as soon have dispensed with (and one that probably won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t seen Burrows’ almost never revived play or its 1969 film adaptation.)

On the decidedly plus side, the production’s L.A.-stage-star-studded ensemble do all-around delicious work under Sacred Fools’ Jaime Robledo’s astute direction, in particular an on-fire Duke and a never-better Phelan.

Scenic designer Joyce Hutter merits kudos for her Our Town-inspired set, Matthew Richter for his subtle-meets-dramatic lighting, Linda Muggeridge for her tasty mix of 450s BC and 1930s AD costumes, and Robledo for his sound design mix of prerecorded and live Foley effects.

Medea Comes To Our Town is produced by Paul Hoan Zeidler for Lighting Rod Theater. Charlie Pacello is executive producer. Ryan Thomas Johnson is music director. Scott Golden is publicist.

I thoroughly enjoyed huge chunks of Medea Comes To Our Town, others less so, and I wouldn’t have minded a ten-to-fifteen-minute trim. Still, if you’re a diehard theater aficionado like me, there’s much to be savored when Medea Comes To Our Town.

McCadden Place Theater, 1157 N. McCadden Place Hollywood.
www.lightningrodtheater.com

–Steven Stanley
August 25, 2024
Photos: Gloria Ines Olivis

 

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