Dood Paard

Dood Paard is an avant-garde theatre company from Amsterdam that specializes in postmodern takes on classical subjects. Their current offering is called “medEia” and is their take on the ancient highly charged tale of Medea, famous for loving Jason of the Golden Fleece fame and killing their children. The three actors take the pose of the helpless chorus who must watch, experience, and digest the story as they try to get inside the skin of the characters and their own actors sensibilities to understand the unfathomable. They perform their piece using what they call  “Euro-English”, a kind of broken English used by non-native speakers. The play is punctuated throughout with snatches of popular song lyrics by the Beatles, the Doors, Joy Davidson, Madonna, and Public Enemy. The piece is performed in front of a series of paper curtains that they tear down, coming closer and closer to the audience as their inability to do anything about the tragedy happening in front of them, becomes apparent. Dood Paard’s radical approach provides a startling, contemporary commentary on the ancient tale’s great themes of love, adultery, jealousy, isolation, and women’s vulnerability and power in a male-dominated world. What is most interesting in all this is that they work without a director, reversing the normal relationship between the actor and character, where the actor is expected to step into the characters shoes. The results are both personal and distancing; personal, in showing the actors frustration in trying to best express the experiences of the character, and distancing, in a very modern sense of alienation from the horror that surrounds us as we are bombarded with images and points of view from the media.

MACGOWAN LITTLE THEATRE- UCLA 310 825 4401 through Sept 23