Three people two men and a woman dressed in neutral-colored clothing will stand in front of four giant, sand-colored sheets of paper.
I am so sad, one of them will say. So many tears I wept today / And all the tears that I will weep today / I ll weep again tomorrow.
Simple speech, a minimal backdrop and little movement create an atmosphere ripe for the imagination in medEia, a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Jason and Medea by Dood Paard, a three-member theater group from Amsterdam. The American premiere of MedEia is at the Spoleto Festival next weekend.
Written by Oscar van Woensel in collaboration with fellow Dood Paard actors Kuno Bakker and Manja Topper, medEia twists the basic plot of Euripides tragedy into a universal look at modern-day politics and society.
A lot of people know ( Medea ), van Woensel said in a phone interview from his Amsterdam home. It has some ingredients about love, the beautiful things and the destructive things of love. At the same time, it is a political story.
Medea is a stranger to a new land.
Written in four days and finished in the course of six weeks, the text of medEia is in simple English what van Woensel calls European English, the common language that connects many different cultures.
The English words are woven into snippets from popular British and American love songs.
There is a collective memory of love songs thanks to the Beatles and Elvis Presley, van Woensel said. That s why we use very simple English, and it is full of lines from pop songs. That is impossible to do in Dutch.
In the play, the three actors serve as a chorus, narrators who cannot intervene in the actions of the characters. They can only observe the tragedy before them unseen by the audience and relay it by physically moving closer and closer to the edge of the stage.
It makes it very personal, and it is also about us as members of a society, van Woensel said.
We as a chorus are just looking at the tragedy and are not able to help. In the story, we see a woman killing children. In reality, we as Western members of society look at wars and we see hunger and see people dying of disease, and we are not doing anything.
We are seeing it and talking about it and not acting.
The tale is interrupted at crucial points when one of the paper panels is ripped down, signaling the end of an act. For its trip to the United States, Dood Paard purchased a new set of papers to replace the ones that have been used since the play premiered in 1998.
If observed closely, the old papers would reveal cracks and tears where they were glued back together after each show literally a map of medEia performances.
The spelling of the play s title, using a capitalized e, was both a way to distinguish this performance of Medea and a social statement. If the large e is removed, the word media remains.
According to van Woensel, the media are the channel through which Western society views tragedies across the world.
Van Woensel is not sure how American audiences will react to the Dood Paard production, which leaves the door wide open for interpretation.
We don t choose things with one specific meaning, he said.
There s never one meaning. There are always several possibilities.
WHEN: 8 p.
m. Friday, 2 p.m.
Saturday, 8 p.m.
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