Simon Stone Faced the Unthinkable. He Thinks You Should Too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/theater/simon-stone-medea-bam.html

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LONDON — A woman, abandoned by her husband, murders her children. A man, conspiring with his sister, stabs his mother. A young woman slits her throat with her lover’s razor. A girl shoots herself. A boy shoots himself. A child walks into the sea.

It could happen to you. It could happen to me. This is what the director and writer Simon Stone was arguing, on a wet night in Notting Hill in late September. The sky spat down, but Stone had insisted on sitting outside of an Italian trattoria, mostly under an awning, so that he could smoke several hand-rolled cigarettes.

“Myths resurge,” he said, ignoring a plate of spaghetti alle vongole. Stone’s theater insists that tragedy can come for any of us, at any time.

In 2018, Stone brought his shattering version of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma,” about a woman crazed by infertility, to New York’s Park Avenue Armory. This winter the Brooklyn Academy of Music will produce his harrowing reworking of Euripides’s “Medea,” starring the actors Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. Performances begin on Jan. 12.

Stone, 35, has warm, slightly wild blue eyes, a short, scraggled beard and long brown hair. “Jesus Christ Superstar,” sang a man who stopped at the table to beg for change. (Stone directs plays, films and operas, not musicals.) He gave the man some tobacco.

A fast, brilliant talker, he spoke for nearly two hours that first night. I forgot to eat, too. “I couldn’t tell you what’s driving the guy, but something is that makes it necessary for him to be the biggest person in the room or in the restaurant or on the street,” the producer David Lan, a frequent collaborator, would tell me.

Stone was in London directing “The Dig,” a movie for Netflix based on the 1939 discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial hoard on a Suffolk estate. A car loitered nearby to bring him to a night shoot in Surrey. Excavating the past, wrenching it into the present — that’s very much his brand.

The youngest child of Australian scientists, Stone grew up all over. “I’ve never lived in a place longer than five years. In the last 15 years, I haven’t lived in a place longer than 18 months,” he told me.

When he was 12, his father had a heart attack in a swimming pool, dying in front of him. Stone immersed himself in plays, reading as many as five a day, and films, sometimes watching 15 in a week. He turned to acting, because he was, he said, “really, really weirdly behaved. I had too many emotions, too many too inappropriate emotions.” Those emotions found a home onstage.

In his early 20s, he founded a theater company in Melbourne, the Hayloft Project, and began directing classical plays, rewriting scenes that felt stodgy, outdated. Eventually, as a resident director at the Belvoir theater in Sydney, he began reworking the plays entirely — “sampling and remixing,” as he put it — modernizing circumstance and idiom to show myths endure.

He has the ability, his colleague, the director Benedict Andrews said, “to drag plays kicking and screaming into the present, so they feel urgent, necessary and immediate.”

Articles often refer to him as an enfant terrible, and Andrews did tell me about an early play of his, an adaptation of Ibsen’s “Little Eyolf” performed mostly in a bathtub and mostly naked. But Stone dismisses the label. It speaks to theater’s conservatism and its elitism. If he really wanted to shock people, “I would do very different theater,” he said. “Like, I could really show people if I really wanted to.”

Instead of alienating audiences, he wants to bring them closer, reminding them of the archetypes that persist even in their own lives. Watching most tragedies, you can comfort yourself with the idea that you would escape that fate, because you are more circumspect, more evolved, because you have been to therapy. His plays don’t allow that.

“What if someone woke up today, and discovered that as much as they were trying to run away from it, they’ve ended up being Yerma or they’ve ended up being Medea?” he said. “That’s my particular obsession.” You could argue that plays like “Yerma” and “Medea” don’t need updating. That’s why they’re classics. But plenty of canonical works — Euripides’s plays or Seneca’s or Shakespeare’s — were remixes, too.

His theater uses contemporary language and circumstance to get at the center of a nightmare — his own nightmare: dying young because his father died young — and maybe find a way to wake up from it. He is just old-fashioned enough to believe in catharsis, the idea that tragedy can purge us of our pity and fear, that it can heal.

Still, his plays, which go down easy and eat you from the inside, don’t present as tragedies. Not initially, anyway. His characters are brainy, funny, sexy, chic. Just like us. And then, almost imperceptibly, comedy stops. Catastrophe starts. And you think — or at least I thought, watching his “Yerma” and remembering the atavistic, irrational desire for another child I had felt after my daughter was born — that could have been me. I cried. I also ordered a pair of overalls like those Billie Piper’s character had worn. I had never shopped a tragedy before.

Stone made “Medea” in 2014 with actors from Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroepamsterdam. Van Hove had suggested the play to him. A story of a woman — a barbarian, a sorceress — who kills her children to punish the husband who betrayed her, it offers one of the greatest and most challenging parts for an actress to play. “For women, this play is really a confronting piece, obviously,” Byrne would tell me when I visited rehearsal in New York late fall.

Stone knew he didn’t want to make a shocker or a melodrama. Too often, he thought, productions asked, “How terrifying can this human be? How afraid of women should we be?” Instead, he wanted to take the unthinkable — a mother who murders her children — and make it thinkable. “I made it for the women I know that would never want to sit through that show,” he said. “It’s not helpful to make a horror story.”

For a month before rehearsal began he read books, mostly schlocky true crime books, searching for a contemporary analogue. He found it in Debora Green, an oncologist convicted in 1996 of poisoning her husband with ricin and then killing two of her children in a house fire. He took some aspects of her story, that she had given up her career to raise her children, that she likely suffered from undiagnosed postpartum depression, and prepared to graft them to the original.

I asked him how it had felt, the deep dive into infanticide. Had it been difficult? “No,” he said, “it’s not my trauma.” One of his sisters, a psychiatrist, had mentioned that in most of his work children die. But not parents, which looks a lot like displacement. “What I do is tell traumas that are obliquely related to mine, but not the actual trauma that I went through. Because I’ve always found my life kind of uninteresting,” he said.

He built “Medea,” on the bodies of that first cast, in about six weeks. He would write a scene, the actors would play it, that would tell him where the next scene needed to go. Medea became Anna, a biochemist with two children and a faithless husband who takes credit for her research. He had set “Yerma,” in a glass box, emphasizing the main character’s isolation. But for “Medea,” he envisioned an all-white set — spare, clinical, a kind of laboratory for human experiment.

In mid-December, I visited rehearsal for the New York “Medea,” on the fourth floor of BAM’s Fisher building. The cast had only been at it for about a week and a half and the actors were tentative, still calling for lines. Stone sat on a lumpy sofa and watched them, delighted, laughing to himself in a slightly demented way.

“I hope that it never gets better than that,” he said afterward. “Ever.” To him, that tentativeness felt truthful, instinctive. He prefers spontaneity to consistency, and he won’t rehearse a scene more than a few times. The most emotionally arduous scenes, he barely runs at all, which can unsettle actors.

Billie Piper, who starred in Stone’s “Yerma,” likened his rehearsal process to jumping off a ledge. “You feel completely out of control,” she wrote in an email. “It’s the handing over of everything you’ve ever learned as an actor and living moment to moment.” No subsequent project has felt as meaningful. “It’s like moving on from a really intense lover,” she wrote. “You know it’s necessary and possibly healthier, but it’s also a bit depressing.”

Byrne had known Stone for years, through mutual friends in the Australian art scene, and had seen his work often. She had seized the chance to do “Medea”— “one of the great roles for women, there’s not many,” she told me. But she was finding Stone’s methods sometimes disconcerting.

“He loves to live in this state of indecision, or suspension,” Byrne said.

Stone had told me that he nearly always has to talk actors down. “People always want to guarantee that they’re going to be good,” he said.

After rehearsal, standing in the hall, I could half hear Stone closeted in a dressing room, reassuring Byrne and Cannavale, who have been a couple for seven years. It was always like this, he murmured, it was supposed to be like this. They would find their way to their particular version of the myth, the one that could live now.

I talked to Stone for the last time a week later, just before Christmas. I’d caught him, he said, at an in-between moment, though he admitted that most of his moments are in-between — in between projects, in between countries, in between colleagues. It was thrilling, he said, but melancholy, too. “You do constantly have this sense that you’re leaving places and people behind,” he said.

He was speaking to me from Munich. He would soon leave for Vienna, then return to New York for “Medea” rehearsal and previews, where he would try, every night, to heave the past — his, mine, everyone’s — into our shared present.