Review: "Jason, Medea & the Tragedy at the PS19 Talent Show" Sets a New Myth in New York

Jason, Medea & the Tragedy at the PS19 Talent Show

Written and performed by Mark Blane

Directed by Dante Fuoco

Presented at spit&vigor tiny baby blackbox theatre

115 Macdougal St, Manhattan, NYC - Studio 3C

June 26-August 28, 2025

The story of Jason and Medea, particularly as recounted in Euripides' play Medea (431 BCE) is, like the oft-adapted Macbeth, a tragic tale of ambition, betrayal, and murder among public figures that seems to invite regular reinvention in the modern era. Political and sexual perfidy in pursuit of social advancement, it turns out—not to mention violent revenge—translate quite well for contemporary audiences. With Jason, Medea & the Tragedy at the PS19 Talent Show, film and theater artist Mark Blane transposes the titular couple to twenty-first century New York City in a lean, captivating solo show that ingeniously reimagines the ancient Greek hero and sorceress as East Village actors. The play is also being adapted into a film, scheduled to shoot in the fall, for which additional funding and executive producers are currently being sought.

The play, which begins at a moment of crisis before doubling back to trace the narrative's return to that point, follows Jason (Jay) Fleece and Medea (Dea) Colchis; now married with a school-aged child named Theo, the couple met in their acting program in college. Much as Medea's magic in Greek myth meant that she was always more powerful than Jason, who used her abilities to his own advantage, this Medea is starring in A-list Hollywood movies while her husband is doing things like solo theatrical shows and hosting the titular elementary school event. At a screening of Dea’s new film, Jay meets and is attracted to Craeg, the nonbinary child of Dea’s powerful agent, Ian Cohen. This meeting, combined with an inadvisable admission from Dea during the post-screening Q&A, places an enormous strain on the couple's marriage, the consequences of which come to a catastrophic head.

While Blane plays all of these characters, Jay is the character who speaks as "I" within the narrative, which is highly significant for the concern with perspective that is central to this adaptation. Jay’s affair, for instance, is presented sympathetically, as an authentic connection during a time when his wife is increasingly "unwell," to use his preferred term; but, of course, it is Jay doing the presenting. The importance of perspective becomes explicitly foregrounded in a late flashback marked by a radical change in lighting, illuminating areas of the intimate blackbox theater previously in darkness, and by actor Evie Renata literally pulling back the curtains at the beginning of the scene (in which, it should be noted, she is excellent).

The unsparing lighting in the aforementioned flashback folds the audience into the performance in a way, too, and perspective is also linked to performance throughout the play, including in its uses of projected video. Dea’s Hollywood film, for example, is represented by a bricolage of audio from contemporary films over clips from older, largely black and white footage. We see some of a dance number from Theo's classmates, but the clips of reaction videos concerning Dea’s revelation at the screening are no less performative. At another point, the play blends inside and outside the theater in a terrific, unexpected segment (prepared for by earlier localizing references, including to the street that the theater is on) in which Blane's performance has enough choreography to it to register as performance. There is probably some post-structuralist interpretation available here about the circulation of images, including of the self, but unquestionably, the play repeatedly presents performance bleeding over into real life ("real" life?) or the loss of that separation entirely (a categorical collapse tied to ambition and revenge among other motivations). If we view Euripides' Medea as haunting Blane's, we might even see performance (in theater, film, or life) as linked to, or as a species of, magic or witchcraft.

The adaptation's updates are shrewd and well-considered: some are thematic, like bringing the gender issues present in Euripides' play into conversation with #MeToo and genderqueerness, and some are in the details, as when Dea refers to Craeg as a princess or Jay describes Dea’s agent as a kingmaker, both allusions to the roles of their analogues in Euripides. As all of these characters and more, Blane is consistently engrossing, expertly shifting not only voice but also body language as they hop among the show's various characters, and in the scene at the talent show itself, impressively swapping between both characters and locations, a feat bolstered by the sound design. Near the end of Jason, Medea & the Tragedy at the PS19 Talent Show, Jason asserts that "we are all unwell," and, in this funny, sharp, emotive production, that might all depend on how you look at it and who's doing the looking.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards