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| Maria Aho, Chet Doherty. |
MEDEA AND JASON [Drama/Greece/Marriage/Period]
AD/D: Eugenie Leontovich; SC: Robinson Jeffers’s version of Euripides’ Medea; CH: Nora Peterson; S: Alan Beck;
C/M: Thom Edlun; L: Lee Goldman; P: Catherine Ellis; T: Little Theatre; 10/2/74
(1)
In a way, this play can be considered a revival of a revival
in that it was an adaptation of a 1947 adaptation of a Greek classic whose
Broadway production had starred Judith Anderson and John Gielgud. But the 1947
play was itself in many ways a new play, and Eugenie Leontovich’s version of
that version was treated as a similarly new work. As it was, it turned out to
be a totally unsuccessful drama that Clive Barnes dismissed as “not interesting
at all.” “Everything about the evening was numbingly awful,” he averred, an
opinion that helped it vanish after a single showing.
It began with a prologue, set in a modern “Greek bistro,”
consisting of a bacchanal of seminude dancers, and then moved into the ancient
story. Adaptor-director Leontovich, a respected, Russian-born actress, tried to
give the play some arty effects, but her lack of insight into the text, and the
horrendous acting of her company, turned the production into what Martin
Gottfried deemed an “embarrassing” affair.
Maria Aho, a Finnish actress making her New York debut,
played Medea “with all the malevolent dignity of a street peddler,” noted
Douglas Watt. Richmond F. Johnson was Jason, and Chet Doherty was Creon. The
most notable name in the cast was that of distinguished Austrian-born architect/actress
Lilia Skala, recipient of an Oscar nomination for Lilies of the Field, who played the Nurse.