Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Corinne Jaber’s haunting MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY prismatically examines sexual abuse

• By drediman
• February 23, 2024
• No Comments

This week, I was able to catch up with WP Theater and PlayCo’s co-production of Corinne Jaber’s Munich Medea: Happy Family, which concludes its limited run at WP Theater on the Upper West Side this weekend. Set in Germany, Jaber’s new play tells the story of Caroline and Alice, two women who, as girls, were sexually abused by the same man — a well-known stage actor who also happens to be the father of one of the girls.

Watching the play, I was reminded by a pair of haunting landmark plays — Paula Vogel’s devastating Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive and Brian Friel’s classic Faith Healer. Like the latter, Munich Medea is told through interlocking, Rashomon-like monologues that shed prismatic light on the play’s tragic events. Throughout, the three characters speak to the audience directly — with only the occasional glance at each other — a stylistic approach that highlights their suffocating loneliness in the face of extreme trauma. Almost as if by the characters’ self-preserving design, there’s a certain formality to their use of language that distances it from the unsavoriness of their experiences. However, try as they might to rid themselves of it, the abuse they endured hangs thickly in the air, as if suspended in space and time.

Although the work breaks no new ground in terms of content and form, it’s nonetheless an absorbing study of abuse and trauma, especially as performed by the production’s three actors. Notably affecting are Crystal Finn and Heather Raffo, who give contrasting, disarmingly honest turns as Caroline and Alice. Munich Medea is directed with stark, clear-eyed elegance by Lee Sunday Evans, one of Off-Broadway’s most consistently thoughtful directors.

RECOMMENDED

MUNICH MEDIA: HAPPY FAMILY
Off-Broadway, Play
WP Theater / PlayCo
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Through February 25