Medea (BAM) NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, Torched by Love: Simon Stone’s contemporary spin on the classic tale of marital vengeance feels more clinical than tragic."
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3/5 stars: "Byrne is riveting, but the effort at psychological dimension in a modern setting detracts from the play's mythic dimension. Stone's 'Medea' is ultimately the story of a woman who murders people because she is severely mentally ill."
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"How Do You Solve a Problem Like 'Medea?'"
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"Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star as a divided couple in Simon Stone's modern-day riff on Euripides' classic Greek tragedy."
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"By framing his American bourgeois Medea with the trappings of avant-garde scenography, perhaps Stone hopes to elevate his text, but banality isn't that easy to shake."
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"Beware. This stylish ‘Medea’ adaptation offers no escape, for Rose Byrne or for you."
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"'Medea' is modern reinvention of a tragic classical thriller"
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"Rose Byrne Plays Medea On Meds: The Bridesmaids actor portrays a 21st-century analogue to the monstrous mom, opposite real-life partner Bobby Cannavale."
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3/5 Stars. "Author Simon Stone, who also directs, succeeds in presenting something undeniably stunning. Unfortunately, the stunning aspect only goes so far dramatically."
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4/5 Stars. "This Medea offers all the horror of the original. Stone's play is, in fact, more unrelentingly bleak than his blazing, shattering 'Yerma.'"
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"While Simon Stone's adaptation is engrossing for its surprising updates, it never captures the emotions, seeming more like a gimmick that a reworking of the Greek tragedy. With most of the actors underplaying their roles, the emotional temperature never really heats up."
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Best Bet. "Your feelings about this 'Medea' will really come down to how you feel about [director] Stone's concept…such minimalist staging is difficult to do well, and Stone exceeds tremendously…the live video never feels superfluous; at its best, it yanks us into Anna's orbit."
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"For at least a century, the scorned wife has been all the rage. She ties 'Hamlet' for ubiquitous Broadway revivals, appearing each decade from the 1970s to the aughts. And no role has earned its actor as many Tony Awards or inspired more contemporary adaptations."
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Score: 65% "I was interested but never concerned. As sad a story as this is, I remained outside. An observer, uninvolved. Not, I suspect, the effect desired by the creative team."
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"Looks less like a modern update of Euripides' tragedy than a fashion shoot…The dialogue is often terse but sophisticated, and the performers are all fine. But the cast and the dialogue and even the story must cede much of the spotlight to the avant-garde stagecraft."
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"Dressed in unobtrusively stylish garb…, the entire company is fine-tuned to Stone's calibrations. Byrne…reveals explosive power beneath the delicacy of her porcelain beauty. Cannavale…is beautifully natural, making his pain and bewilderment bitingly believable."
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"The production fortunately has one thing that never fails it: an ideal interpreter in the extraordinary Rose Byrne, who gives an sometimes seductive, sometimes terrifying and consistently intense performance as Anna."
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"What follows is a cringe-inducing, granular examination of a failed relationship that lumbers rather than soars to its conclusion. Julia Frey's videos project the characters' faces in close-up on a huge scrim."
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