Serial Mom

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

One dazzling image can be enough to make an otherwise competent production unforgettable, and the Medea that has been imported to Broadway from London climaxes with an astonishing tableau. After wreaking the most comprehensive revenge that a scorned wife has ever devised -- slaying her cheating husband's royal fiance and soon-to-be father-in-law, then slaughtering her sons so her husband's bloodline will die with him -- Medea sets sail for a new life. Most stagings leave her outside her home merely talking of departure. In director Jonathan Kent's version, a wall topples to reveal Diana Rigg apparently already at sea. Hunched during her period of rage and oppression, she stands proud as a ship's figurehead, clouds streaming past, golden light burnishing her. Then she turns and looks back, toward the scene of her unrepented misdeeds and, surely, toward an audience agape at the beauty and power of this finale.

The rest is more ordinary. Rigg is wonderful in quiet moments but awkward in striving for the unchained melodrama that Zoe Caldwell achieved in a 1982 revival. The balance of the cast, also from London, is workmanlike, save for Nuala Willis, whose keening songs redeem that most archaic of theatrical ploys, the chorus. The set, a vast wall of rusted metal panels that bang like thunder and tumble away at key moments, is effective but excessive, a tacit confession of shaky faith in the power of the play's words. That doubt is foolish. Medea is the greatest role ever written for a woman, fiercer than Lady Macbeth, more lovelorn than Phedre. Despite Rigg's shortcomings as Euripides' virago, the role makes her the odds-on contender to join Caldwell and Judith Anderson, who played the part on Broadway in 1948, as winners of a Tony Award for Best Actress.