Before every performance of Medea Re-Versed , the play’s writer, Luis Quintero, stands at the door, welcoming the audience with exuberant high-fives and handshakes. After every performance, he bounds straight upstairs to the lobby, sweaty and still in costume — he’s also a key part of the seven-person cast — and begins a short talkback with anyone who wants to stick around. “I think theater should be more like church,” I heard him say to the group that was assembling post-show.
“If I could, I’d have cookies and coffee for you.” Quintero’s energy, onstage and off-, is big and super-sincere, unfeignedly humble and curious, with a bubbling undercurrent of enthusiasm that’s always ready to bust through the surface. It’s pretty irresistible, and what it has generated when run through the bloodstream of one of the world’s oldest, darkest tragedies is a singular beast: a play with both viscera and humor, wit and poignancy.
He has a distinctive and gutsy take on the ancient Greek conception of theater as a civic process, a place for reckoning consciously, communally, and poetically with impossible questions. “Who does it really cost for us to pay to see a tragedy?” Quintero asks in the show’s preface, where he introduces himself as our coryphaeus — leader of the chorus, or, to be true to the genre at hand, “the M.C.
” With remarkable faithfulness to Euripides, Medea Re-Versed renders the more-than-2,400-year-old play into hip-hop, a series of high.