Well. So our most-reviewed-ever show’s reviews are mostly out: to near-universal pans.

Charles Mudede of The Stranger says: “The writers went wrong in the final act—it has the heaviness of revealing a final and amazing truth, but its truth is not heavy or staggering. We already know that life in the suburbs is empty and soulless. Even people living in the suburbs know that. Medea Knows Best should never have pushed beyond the lightness of its music and comedy.”

Joe Adcock of the P-I says: “As has been pointed out time and time again by sociologists and satirists, songwriters and dramatists, the American Dream can be a stifling nightmare.
Nebunele recycles this well-worn insight. At times the playwrights seem to be implying that peace is boring and war is stimulating — not a welcome view at a time when war is deadening and peace is hardly imaginable. ” (Though he does give props to some of the “sharply caricatured performances.”)

Most damning of all is Seattle Times’s Misha Berson, who says: “And what a pity the neighborhood Greek chorus of domestic goddesses, harmonizing on renditions of pop oldies (”Catch a Falling Star,” “Chapel of Love”), can’t save Medea from adultery and mayhem — nor rescue this production by Seattle’s Nebunele Theatre from tedium….this is awfully well-trodden ground on stage and screen. And doggedly plowing it again, without turning up much that’s new, makes for a long and not terribly illuminating show.”

The sad thing about all this is that we never meant to say that 50’s suburbia is deadening. That was not our point, although three out of four Seattle reviewers seem to think it was. In fact, we wanted to highlight the opposite: that there is something real happening there, and that to deride this world all the way is to overlook the things about these choices that are beautiful and powerful. We wanted to *start* from that cultural assumption that all of this is meaningless, and then argue for these choices, give them a little weight; we wanted to say that faith in a perfect structure isn’t necessarily such a deadly thing, and that we do it as a people for a reason, even if maybe we sometimes don’t get it right.

But enough people are coming away with the opposite understanding that it’s clear: either we did a bad job of communicating what we wanted, or we underestimated the power of our audiences’ expectations. I think these reviewers saw the setup and extrapolated where we were going from everything else that’s in the American canon on this topic, and didn’t wait to see that we were actually trying to push it in the other direction. We were so careful not to seem to promote the aspects of that culture that *are* deadly, though, that I think we didn’t argue hard enough or long enough for the beauty we wanted to support. I don’t think any of these reviewers considered the very end of the play…and, were we to rewrite again, I think that would be highly valuable information. Our audience expects a certain argument, and we have to work much harder to subvert it.

Here’s the parade of gloom:

Seattle Weekly blurb (Not really more than summary, though it does mention the giant TV’s awesomeness):
http://seattleweekly.com/listings/theaters/433419

The Stranger:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Event?event=561420

The PI:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/362766_theater13.html

The Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004416680_medea16.html

So far no word from Miryam Gordon of TheatreMania and Seattle Gay News. Perhaps she has decided to spare us.

Oh, critics! Oh, plays!
Hoping that some people still come see the show,
Alissa