Dangers Set Sail in 'Argonautika'

Mary Zimmerman's going to sea again.

The Tony-winning stage auteur has spent much imaginative time on water over the years, with productions like "The Odyssey" (a decade-long sail from Troy to Ithaca), "Pericles" (danger and serendipity on the Mediterranean), and "Metamorphoses" (the stage itself was a pool). Now she's directing her adaptation of "The Argonautika," the epic tale of Jason's ship-borne quest for the Golden Fleece.

"I'm obsessed with sea voyages," Zimmerman acknowledges, "though I've never been on one." Jason, on the other hand, went on one too many.

"The Argonautika" follows this dispossessed Greek prince as he assembles a crew of heroes and sets off on an errand devised by his devious uncle, Pelias, to keep him out of the way--if at all possible, forever.

The first half of the journey is pure picaresque, full of exotic adventures and tight scrapes. The Argonauts meet Amazons, giants, and vicious Harpies (the latter designed to evoke a "beautiful ugliness" by puppeteer Michael Montenegro). They battle, box and rescue.

"It's funny and spectacular visually," Zimmerman says of her staging at Lookingglass Theatre, "and it moves really fast."

Things take a dark turn, though, when they reach Colchis, home of King Aietes and the Fleece. (The fleece is the golden remains of a mythical flying ram--but that's another story.) Jason's divine sponsors, the goddesses Athene and Hera, decide to help him by getting Eros to shoot one of his arrows into the heart of Aeites' daughter, Medea. Literally pierced through by love, the young sorceress becomes Jason's simultaneously abject and ferocious ally, helping him first to steal the Fleece and then to kill her brother in order to escape with it.

"She just jumps," observes Atley Loughridge, who makes her professional debut here, playing Medea. "She jumps off the edge of her world. She destroys her world. She knows what she's giving up, she knows how horrid it is the whole time that she's following Jason, and at the same time her burning for him is unbearable."

So naturally Jason betrays her. Eager to make a marriage that will give him the throne of Thessaly, he dumps Medea for a new and younger princess. "It's not about how I treat you or you treat me," Zimmerman has him telling Medea as he backs out the door. "It's so much bigger."

You may know what's next from Euripides' play, "Medea," among sources. The archetypal woman scorned kills Jason's bride and serves him his two children disguised as dinner.

Zimmerman's script doesn't dwell on these final atrocities.

"To most people, Medea is a code word for those horrible, murdering, witchy women who kill their children. This is the sort of prequel to that," she says. "It could be subtitled, `Medea, or How She Got that Way.'"

Is this "Argonautika" designed to rehabilitate Medea, then? "Yeah," Zimmerman replies during a conversation held, appropriately, at an Argo Tea cafe. "Or to complicate her, at least. If you read [the ancient Greek version of] `The Argonautika,' it is lavish and extensive and emphatic about how she had no choice. How this was something that was done to her, this love, and that it drove her crazy."

Interestingly, Zimmerman's program for elevating Medea doesn't entail any special effort to denigrate Jason. "The Argonautika," she points out, is already "an anti-heroic adventure, even though at the beginning it's full of very masculine enthusiasm about this big, giant task that they're going to do and how they're going to kick Aeites' butt."

The expedition comes to less than nothing in material terms. "Oh, these glorious missions of men," laments one chorally spoken speech near the end of the play. "They start out so well, so full of hope and noble intent."

Any parallel one might draw to present-day military adventures, Zimmerman avers, is entirely intentional.

Dan Ostling's set for "The Argonautika" is a massive, clean-lined, shiplike structure with a deck, a bridge that extends across the full width of the Lookingglass playing area, and a mast "that is also tree and a pathway to heaven" in Loughridge's poetic phrase. Zimmerman notes that western theater itself owes a lot to the iconography of ships because wintering sailors used to moonlight by working backstage. Hence terms like "crew" and "rigging."

She finds this apt. "There's a great similarity to me between a theater and a boat, and a play and a ship that takes you somewhere," she says.

Which (a) makes Jason's adventure not just a voyage, but a voyage within a voyage, and (b) makes you wonder why Zimmerman thinks she's never been on one.