Review: Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale Put Murder and Marriage Center Stage in “Medea”

“Medea” is one of the stories that you know going in what’s going to happen— no matter what, the tossed-aside wife is going to murder her children — but you watch anyway, almost unable to look away. Simon Stone, who wrote and directed a new adaptation currently playing at BAM’s Harvey Theater, has created a painfully uncanny world that translates Euripides to modern day, inspired by a real life Kansan woman who murdered her children. On the surface, the gruesome filicide of “Medea” seems unfathomable, and yet as Stone’s program interview states, it’s actually not that unheard of, even in our modern, supposedly civilized society.

So if, as Stone tells us, mothers are still murdering their children, it maybe makes sense to look for 21st century echoes of Medea. Stone’s goal here is to write what might be considered a feminist apologia for Medea, a psychological exploration of what it takes for a mother to get to the point of murdering her children. The final product may not achieve its feminist goals, but it is nonetheless an undeniably chilling and thought-provoking production.

As proven with his “Yerma,” Stone is one of the major theatrical auteurs of this generation, known for his evocative and experimental stagings of classics. For “Medea” this meant converting the Harvey…