Photos courtesy of CSULB.
I am usually wary when it comes to adaptation, especially when that adaptation is based on classic material. Rarely, if ever, does something actually get adapted. More often than not, adaptations make carbon copies of the original, or lesser versions of it.
A true adaptation (or re-imagining) uses its inspiration as a starting point for a further exploration of an idea or theme inherent in its source material.
I don’t understand adapting something without finding a reason for that adaptation. If you can’t bring something new to the table why one would waste their time going through the trouble at all? Usually the answer is marketability or guaranteed money making, but when the source material in question is Euripides’s bloody, familial-tragedy Medea, you can pretty quickly count those options out.
Medea serves as the basis for Marina Carr’s contemporary Irish adaptation By The Bog Of Cats, an unfortunately named but lyrical and moving play that was recently mounted in a stunning production by the Cal State Long Beach University Players and directed by Alexis Macnab.
In Euripides’ Medea, the title character is betrayed by her husband who leaves her for another woman. With her place in society threatened, Medea devises a plan to kill not only her husband’s new wife, but the two children Medea bore with him as well. She then commits all of these crimes for the sake of revenge, a troubling fact that has always led to the play’s controversy.
By The Bog Of Cats moves the story from ancient Greece to the locale of the play’s name. The Bog Of Cats is a mythical landscape in Ireland’s Midlands region, full of lost and searching souls who are living, dead or ambiguously in-between.
Here we meet a gypsy of the Bog, Hester Swane (Alyssa Garcia), who at the play’s opening is confronted by the Ghost Fancier (Chris Bearden) and mistaken as a ghost herself. When he discovers that he is early, having mistaken dawn for dusk, and that Hester is still among the living, he apologizes and bids her farewell. From this early encounter, we know that by the play’s end Hester will be dead; in this case, making the route by which she comes to meet her fate the action of the piece.
Hester has only one child—as opposed to Medea’s two—and the relationship with her daughter Josie (Carolina Montenegro) is tender, conflicted and far more emotionally relevant than any of the dynamics we see between Medea and her children. Josie’s father, Carthage Kilbride (Deon L. Jones Jr.) is marrying another, possibly out of love, and possibly for the land that comes with the marriage. Regardless of his ambiguous reasons, it is clear that he and his new wife don’t want Hester around.
As she is threatened with being cast from her homeland and torn from her daughter, Hester must confront her own feelings of abandonment that date back to her mother leaving her as a child. She must also choose to lead her daughter towards or away from similar heartbreak.
Given that much of what is enjoyable about this production is the way in which the events surprise and hypnotize the audience, there’s little need to continue on the ploty. Just know that the play packs one hell of an emotional wallop and that any unevenness that exists in the script is out-shined by its beautiful poetry, strong character development and its dedication to the dark and magical world in which its story is set.
The all-student (?!) cast, while not being seasoned actors or at the appropriate age of each of the play’s characters, are nonetheless so dedicated to this material and well-led in it that not one of them distracts from the piece’s viewability. The colorblind casting helps greatly with the mythological feeling of the play and everyone in this cast gives a good performance.
An alarming few are even truly excellent—especially givent that an Irish dialect is an insanely hard thing to master and the cast succeeds at keeping this up (at least serviceably). I would much rather see an emotionally believable performance with a wavering accent than a brilliant Irish dialect on top of a so-so acting job. This is Long Beach, California—and not The Bog Of Cats or even South Boston after all, so the minor grains of salt that are to be taken with this play’s performances are pretty negligible.
Alyssa Garcia’s Hester is a complex creation and an incredibly difficult role for a young actress. Ms. Garcia rises to the occasion, however, and amazingly becomes more intriguing, sexy and even relatable as she descends further and further into her madness and towards her destiny. It is easy for one to know not how to feel about her, but by the time she delivered her monologue that closes the first act, it is hard not to be hooked.
Deon L. Jones Jr. yells just a little bit too much as Carthage Kilbride (as does some of the rest of the cast throughout the evening), but ultimately his masculine presence and some underplayed moments of tenderness help to balance out his conflicted character.
Dilians Sosa is incredibly compassionate as Monica Murray, Hester’s neighbor and only true sympathizer. There is a scene in the second act when she scans the entire audience as if she is looking to them for an impossible answer. The look in her eyes is one most will not forget anytime soon.
It is Carolina Montenegro as Josie Kilbride, however, that is perhaps the production’s most revelatory performance. So often when adults play children, so much of their behavior becomes exaggerated or contrived in a way that can feel cloying. The physicality that Ms. Montenegro finds for Josie is one of the more startling I’ve seen. I found myself constantly pulled back and forth between an awareness of the actresses’ actual age and the age of 7-year-old Josie. There were a few moments when it almost became distracting, especially during the wedding scene, but luckily, she always pulled back just before it did.
Josie’s scenes with Hester were beautifully empathetic, making a believable relationship out of only two short scenes and laying out the emotional foundation for the play’s tragic ending. Even more impressive, however, are the moments where Josie seemingly embodies the whole line of women she has come after, beginning with Hester’s mother and ending with Josie herself in a truly chilling and supernatural way that must be seen to be understood. Bravo.
The mystical world of The Bog of Cats comes to vivid and imaginative life through the help of a top-notch creative team. The abstract but beautifully eerie junkyard set by Brittany Blouch greets the audience as they enter. An elevated circular space at the far back of the stage suggests the Bog, a sacrificial circle and a living space all in one. This is surrounded by sticks and broken household items and sits beneath a suspended accumulation of wooden boards, sheet metal and dead branches: a hanging, ominous structure that is equal parts roof, tree top and thunder cloud.
Bathed in Adrina Wilson’s mood-perfect lighting, we, like the Ghost Fancier, cannot tell if it is supposed to be day or night. The lights continually impress but also suit the action, and the set reveals its versatility slowly and with a couple of surprises. Broken chairs are pulled from the bog for the wedding guests to sit on, and the strewn leaves and bits of earth that cover the thrust stage move beneath the actors feet, creating a remarkable contained atmosphere and leaving paths that slink behind the characters like phantom trails in their wake.
J. Wendy Wallace’s costumes are also in perfect harmony with the world of the play, in styles that reference Victorian and modern dress, but often feel more like they are out of some kind of gypsy-bohemian-fantasy-limbo or underworld. Jessica Westerfield’s original compositions also help the drama along and prove especially moving when in support of the show’s chilling last scene. I only mention these few but really, all elements of the creative team’s efforts fuse together cohesively.
And now, at long last, I must give director Alexis Macnab her due. Macnab has a background in “modern dance, corporeal mime, story-theater and puppetry” and is an accomplished director who has made work in both New York City and Los Angeles. Her understanding of these diverse styles is what helps to merge this production’s many elements into a nearly seamless whole. Theater is at its best when it can create a physical language that is entirely of itself in a uniquely theatrical way.
When a production can create a metaphorically rich world of movement and sound, based on and in alignment with its source material, some truly magical things can happen. Under Macnab’s direction, By The Bog Of Cats finds just that and the result is always engaging and at times actually breathtaking. This is unquestionably the best-directed show I’ve seen in Long Beach since I started at the Post two months ago. I hope this is not the last that she shares with us.