Blood mother

By Rachel Abramowitz

Sept. 20, 2009 12 AM PT

The wail plays like a primitive call to prayer in some undetermined Middle Eastern city. The sound is low, primal, an almost guttural cry -- and it takes a moment to realize that the noise is actually human, that it’s emanating from a corner of the womb-like rehearsal room deep in the bowels of UCLA’s Royce Hall. The source is unexpected -- a faceless woman slung up against a wall, a scarlet scarf covering her head.

When the woman takes the stage, she is no longer crying but almost anesthetized -- blinded -- by pain. This is Annette Bening as Euripides’ Medea, the jilted spouse of Greek hero Jason. Her hair is shorn; her fine, almost delicate features are distorted by the absurdity of her plight. The cool intelligence beats fiercely as it tries to comprehend the new reality: “My lovely life is lost. I want to die,” she says plainly.

Around her, pretty young women in leotards and T-shirts -- the chorus of Corinthian women -- vibrate off her shifting emotions, her seething but lucid argument about the powerlessness of women in Greek society, of the ingrained xenophobia of the Corinthians, of fear of the other. Bening, by theatrical design and force of persona, sucks the energy in the room, like a dangerous vortex.

Of late, the mother of four, wife of Hollywood prince Warren Beatty, has played some notably narcissistic -- deeply flawed -- mothers such as Carolyn Burnham in “American Beauty” and Deirdre Burroughs in “Running With Scissors,” and some women driven mad by love, such as the eponymous “Mrs. Harris,” headmistress turned murderer of the Scarsdale Diet doctor. Now in a brief spurt of maniacal energy, she will wrestle with both passions playing one of theater’s most famous roles at Freud Playhouse for a three-week run as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival. She is the infamous Medea, the immortal witchy granddaughter of the Sun. According to myth, she was so besotted with Jason that she helped him steal the Golden Fleece from her father and later tried to secure a throne for Jason by engineering King Pelias’ death. That’s all before the curtain goes up.

Euripides’ drama starts the moment after Jason has announced his intention to leave Medea and their two sons to marry Glauke, daughter of Corinth’s King Kreon, and hence solidify his and his sons’ position in Greek society. It ends infamously with Medea’s murder of her children, as a way of exacting revenge on her faithless spouse. It sputters to chaos, or as Euripides famously wrote, “Expect the unexpected. What mortals dream, the gods frustrate.”

Character study

Unresolvable primordial passion does seem part of the appeal of playing Medea for Bening and her partner in crime, Croatian theater director Lenka Udovicki. There’s an attraction to the unruly morass that’s largely been banished from daily life, a fact that becomes apparent when the pair shows up after a Sunday rehearsal for a drink at a Westwood hotel.

In person, Bening seems like a woman with her head screwed on right. Out of costume, out of the theatrical zone, she is spare and uncluttered, dressed in sleek yoga pants, an oversize white shirt and thin black glasses. The 42-year-old Udovicki, who’s making her American debut, is a warm and slightly brooding presence in black overalls and a white peasant shirt. She smokes furtively.

The duo have the air of moms on the lam from workaday responsibilities. They share a bunch of similarities -- like tons of kids (Bening has four, Udovicki has three as well as stepchildren), and what Bening refers to as “very talented, interesting husbands” -- Beatty and the well-known Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija.

The children hang like friendly ghosts over their work, but Bening admits cheerfully that “we’re sort of obsessed. The great plays become the vehicle for everything in your life while you’re working. When you think about your own life and own family, it all becomes through that prism.”

“You live constantly in another reality. It overcomes your normal daily routine,” adds Udovicki.

The production was Udovicki’s idea after she met Bening at a dinner party. “I was very depressed and thinking about what would really motivate me to work,” she says. What was her fantasy? “I would love to do ‘Medea’ with Annette. The evening we met, it was one of those things that happens: You meet somebody and you feel some deep connection.”

Judging from her resume (including two upcoming movies, “The Kids Are All Right” and “Mother and Child”), Bening is clearly intrigued by the dramatic potential of mothers. “Nothing is more loaded than the whole question of motherhood,” she says adamantly. “Anybody who is a mother experiences that.” Ideal mothers are boring to portray, however. “Mothers that are human, that have frailties and flaws, that’s interesting.”

Very interesting. “Some of the great stories are about how there’s an expectation we all have of mothers, of ourselves as mothers, our own mothers.

“There’s a theory of infant development which I find interesting,” she continues. “A child’s sense of well-being is totally determined by the response to their own physical needs. If I am the baby, and I am hungry, and I am fed, then I am well. I am a good thing. If I’m hungry and I’m not fed, then I am bad.

“That’s all about the mother. As much as the father does participate, it’s your flesh and blood, your body. That’s a very primal, deep physical connection.”

And yet, here she is playing Medea, the witch who breaches this sacrosanct bond, who declares her own self -- her rage at her lover -- to be more important than her children’s lives. As an actress -- and a mother -- Bening can extrapolate from that too. On stage, all taboos are permitted.

“I was talking to a classroom of students, which I try to do,” Bening says. “I was talking about my children, and someone asked, ‘How could you possibly relate to that since you’re a mother?’ ” My response was, ‘Are you kidding?’ Any mother can relate to that. That’s how I feel. Maybe that’s a horrible thing to say.”

Most mothers have tasted frustration with their progeny, or their partners. Not matricidal impulses, perhaps, but “that feeling you’re being gripped by, that you’re not the author of,” says Bening. “Your life is happening to you. You don’t feel like you’re the one driving it. You’re the helpless person trying to cope. The play cuts to the thing we can’t go around thinking all the time because we’d go insane. The big existential questions. ‘Why do things happen as they do?’ ”

“Medea crosses that last line, but you can take it as a metaphor,” says Udovicki. Medea’s flagrant emotional turmoil is the antithesis of today’s emphasis on “be in control of your life. You walk into any bookshop and there’s so many self-help books. There is this kind of obsession, ‘Control your life.’ You go back 2,000 years, and it’s really a question: ‘Can we?’ ”

That magic moment

Bening discovered theater as an ordinary kid growing up in San Diego. It was a production of Shakespeare at the Old Globe. “I had the most unimpressive, dorky background,” she says, but at that moment, she fell in love. “I remember the spit and I remember the sweat on their faces, and I remember just the sounds of their voices, and I just remember thinking, ‘Wow! This is so cool.’ ”

She later studied theater at San Francisco State and eventually joined the repertory company at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, where she played everything from Emily in “Our Town” to Lady Macbeth. She eventually was nominated for a Tony for her New York debut in “Coastal Disturbances” and then began her film career, playing memorably in such films as “The Grifters” and “Bugsy.” It was on “Bugsy” that she met Beatty.

Still, she admits that, “for a long time, I didn’t really understand movies. I didn’t understand playing scenes for two or three minutes. I didn’t understand speaking softly. I felt really uncomfortable. I felt like I was a stage actress pretending I was a movie actress.” She’s come to love the camera, although of late she’s been re-exploring theater, which not incidentally allows her to stay in L.A. with her children. In 2006, she appeared in “The Cherry Orchard” at the Mark Taper Forum, and in February she’s to appear in Joanna Murray-Smith’s satire of feminism “The Female of the Species” at the Geffen Playhouse.

For Medea, Bening has taken inspiration from many places -- from her trip to Iran with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to understand the powerlessness of women in patriarchal societies, from a recent news article about a woman in the Valley who killed her two children -- to recognize why Medea has continuing relevance. She studies the text, not just the Frederic Raphael-Kenneth McLeish translation they’re using but also alternate translations, and she relearns the history of how the plays were performed in ancient Greece as part of a competition. “On one level, it’s just very personal. I look at what moves me. From an acting standpoint, the theory is: You learn to cultivate your own proclivities and your own taste.”

And then she kind of forgets it all, and stops thinking.

“That’s what is different about drama. It’s why I loved it as a kid. It’s big ideas married with emotion. That to me is intriguing. You can only really discover it through doing it.”

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‘Medea’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Westwood

When: Opens Wednesday. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 18.

Price: $80 and $110

Contact: (310) 825-4401