In the play, dated to 431 B.C., Medea has borne Jason two children only to see him leave her to wed Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Creon sends Medea into exile, but she asks for a one-day reprieve, which he grants. She uses the time to take a terrible revenge.
“One of the things we faced working on the play was the profound specter of inevitability,’’ Gammons says, “because everyone just has that one-sentence description of this play: ‘Medea, betrayed by her husband, kills her children.’ It’s hard to face a play that comes freighted with that much expectation.’’
The answer, he says, was to do everything possible to “encourage the notion of possibility, to keep putting aside the idea of where the play would end, and say, ‘In this moment, what is still possible? In their relationship, what can still happen?’ ’’
“She does kill her kids, which is, you know, I can’t really think of anything worse,’’ Israel says. “In addition, though, it’s about extreme betrayal, families, change, and power and where it lies . . . and how are we safe if we don’t have power? And those things are so human.’’
Israel, five months pregnant with her second child, acknowledges she’s in an unusual situation for an actress playing Medea, but she doesn’t want to focus on that.
“I’m not a Method actor; I don’t believe in messing with myself emotionally in order to get there. I get there through the voice, and the breath, through my imagination and through my relationship with the other people on the stage in the moment,’’ she says.
“It is extreme to imagine killing children while there’s one inside,’’ she acknowledges, but other acting challenges get more of her attention. “I’m dealing with [being] a different shape than I’m used to, [having] a different level of energy. And there’s some very extreme physical stuff in the show that we just are a little more careful about.’’
