THEATER: ZOE CALDWELL PLAYS MEDEA

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May 3, 1982, Section C, Page 10Buy Reprints
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EURIPIDES has a strong ally in Zoe Caldwell, who brought her special flame to the otherwise routine revival of ''Medea'' that opened last night at the Cort. Possibly the most modern of Greek dramatists, Euripides demands an intense psychological realism from actors - and that is what Miss Caldwell has bestowed on her marathon role. This actress makes us believe in the warped logic by which Medea murders her two sons to wreak vengeance on Jason, the ambitious husband who has betrayed her for a Greek princess. And because she does, we are, by evening's end, brought right into the thunderclap of Euripides' tragedy.

As befits a barbaric sorceress lost in exile, Miss Caldwell is set off from the rest of the company by her swarthy complexion; her eyes are dark horizontal slashes that summon up an exotic East. There is a seething physicality to her every gesture; mercurial and sinuous, she is indeed, as Robinson Jeffers's adaptation has it, a mixture of ''serpent and wolf.'' Yet she is a woman, too. Though Miss Caldwell has many opportunities to chew up the scenery, she usually resists them by shading her portrayal with carefully considered nuances. This at times almost Hedda-like Medea makes the lineage from Euripides to Ibsen abundantly clear.

One of Miss Caldwell's trump cards is wit. Her Medea gets genuine laughs when she sarcastically extols the virtues of ''civilized'' Greece and her ''kind'' Jason - neither of whom have treated her with anything like civility or kindness. The heroine's sexuality is also turned up full throttle. When Miss Caldwell suddenly kisses Jason (Mitchell Ryan) in the midst of their debate, we see the hot-blooded lust that once made her sacrifice all for him - just as we later see the inverse of that passion in her orgasmic cries of hate and murder. And underneath the frenzy, there is a helplessness as well. Quietly asking how she has been ''pulled down to the hell of vile thoughts,'' Miss Caldwell becomes a blank; she's so adrift from reason that the answer is really lost forever.

From there, it's only a small leap to the unthinkable. In the crucial scene with the sadly childless Aegeus, Miss Caldwell's sly smiles show us the idea of child murder taking root in Medea's crazed mind. When, at last, the crime is at hand, the actress fully dramatizes the struggle between her hunger for revenge and her love of her sons. One moment she is drawing the boys to her breasts in full maternal affection; then she is taking them behind closed doors to spill their blood. There is a relentless sweep to the extreme transition. Like the gods, we can understand, if not pardon, the primal impulse that drives her to the ultimate act of annihilation.

Well paced and often brilliantly calculated as this performance is, it isn't quite perfect. In the early scenes, Miss Caldwell's body language - the tremulous fingers, the shaking thighs, the slithering to the floor - can be stylized to the point of mannerism. Her voice, happily, never follows suit. It is a superb, supple instrument -husky yet feminine and full of longing. When she partakes of her ''bottomless cup'' of hate, she heaves with a primordial ooze that threatens to make the earth open up before us.

If Miss Caldwell's performance often seems more a virtuosic acting exercise than an integral component in a play, that's because the production cuts too much ground out from under her. The director, Robert Whitehead, has fashioned a by-the-book, meat-and-potatoes ''Medea,'' and even Miss Caldwell can't always break through its mustiness.

Mr. Whitehead's association with the play dates to 1947, when he produced the celebrated revival starring Judith Anderson, for whom Jeffers wrote his adaptation. Dame Judith is back again here, in the role of the nurse, and her presence gives this ''Medea'' the valuable resonance of theatrical tradition. While her delivery of the early speeches sounds a bit too patrician and occasionally matter-of-fact, she builds steadily. Her climactic attempts to thwart the heroine's mayhem - a chorus of ''no's'' that sends her off her tree-branch cane and up Medea's steps - are harrowing.

The rest of the acting is bland or bombastic, with the exceptions of Pauline Flanagan's direct, beautifully spoken chorus leader and Giulia Pagano as one of her seconds. While Mr. Ryan's Jason is fine in his final collapse - when he caves into his nihilistic awareness that it no longer matters ''who lives and who dies'' -he's far too plodding a dissembler along the way. Because his overtly callow rationality is no match at all for Miss Caldwell's savage force, the play's central argument is left unengaged.

No one, least of all Mr. Ryan, has been aided by Jane Greenwood's attic Attic costumes. But Ben Edwards's majestic set, reportedly a reworking of the one he did in 1947, has been lighted with an eerie glow of foreboding by Martin Aronstein, and there's music to match by David Amram. Mr. Whitehead's staging is friezelike in its rigidity, and awkward in its deployments of the chorus. True, ''Medea'' is a very hard play to stage, but that doesn't mean one must approach it as if it were a boulder to be pushed up a cliff.

But once Mr. Whitehead does get to the peak, in the last 15 minutes, the payoff is considerable. At that point, Miss Caldwell's volcanic eruption at last sets fire to this ''Medea,'' and even the dead wood around her must burn hellishly in her wake. Serpent and Wolf MEDEA, adapted from Euripides; directed by Robert Whitehead; scenery by Ben Edwards; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Mar- tin Aronstein; music and sounds by David Amram. Presented by Barry and Fran Weissler, by arrangement with the John F. Kennedy Cen- ter for the Performing Arts and Bunny and Warren Austin. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street. Nurse .................................Judith Anderson Tutor .....................................Don McHenry Children ..........Jason Kimmel and Christopher Garvin First Woman of Corinth ...............Pauline Flanagan Second Woman of Corinth ...............Harriet Nichols Third Woman of Corinth ..................Giulia Pagano Medea ....................................Zoe Caldwell Creon .....................................Paul Sparer Jason ...................................Mitchell Ryan Aegeus ..................................Peter Brandon Jason's Slave ..........................Lucien Douglas Handmaidens .................Emily King and Amy Lovell Attendants to Jason Wayne Carson and Ralph Roberts