INTERVIEW: Luis Quintero, sculptor of words, reimagines ‘Medea’
Photo: Medea: Re-Versed was written by Luis Quintero, left, who also stars in the piece with Mark Martin, right. Photo courtesy of Gabe Palacio / Provided by official website.
In a tucked-away corner of the Hudson Valley, located approximately 90 minutes from New York City, Luis Quintero is nightly sculpting words and telling tales from ancient times. The skilled performer and writer is the creative force behind the new show Medea: Re-Versed, which continues until Sept. 2 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. The 80-minute production, which will be seen later this year at New York City’s Red Bull Theater, reimagines the classic Greek play Medea by utilizing the art form of battle raps and hip hop. Quintero wrote the show, and he performs in the piece as the Chorus Leader, heading the Greek chorus who watches the title character descend into bloodshed.
For Quintero, this burst of creative energy began — like so many other artists — when he had some downtime during the pandemic. He was back home in Houston, and he was performing in a digital production for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. He decided to write a rap from the perspective of his character, Malcolm in Macbeth.
“So I sent that to [associate artistic director] Nathan Winkelstein over at Red Bull Theater, who I had worked with a couple of times doing readings,” Quintero said in a recent phone interview. “I just knew that it would be something that he would appreciate. … I didn’t really think of it more than that, but it was from that that Nathan saw something in that song and said, ‘Luis, have you ever considered writing an adaptation?’ I was like, ‘Yes, but I don’t know of what. I don’t really want to do Shakespeare. I feel like everybody is doing a Romeo and Juliet.’ He’s like, ‘You should look at the Greeks.’ I said, ‘Sure, is there one in particular?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you should look at Medea,’ so then I started researching Medea.”
This partnership with Winkelstein continued, and the associate artistic director is billed as co-conceiver of Medea: Re-Versed and its director. For Quintero, this initial spark of inspiration sent him on a long journey of research to better understand Euripedes’ Medea, Ancient Greece and the best examples of battle rapping.
“I saw this version from the 1960s that was a filmed staged version that I think is pretty notable, and from there I watched this really crazy art-house version from the ‘60s that was an Italian film, super artsy and weird,” he said. “And then I just started researching, and that’s really how it took off. I was just writing and researching battle raps and listening to the cadences of battle rappers and the double entendres that they came up with.”
Quintero also ventured into the bloody ramifications and realities of the Medea story itself. Spoiler alert for a play that is thousands of years old: The title character performs a violent act at the show’s climax that is difficult to comprehend.
“I looked up transcripts of women who had committed filicide and would kind of go through their dialogues with the police officers afterwards,” Quintero said. “I looked up testimonials of women who were in toxic, narcissistic relationships with their partners. I could look at the psychologist’s notes, which were totally anonymous, about their clients. Basically it was a way for me to know how these women thought about themselves, the kind of verbiage they would use to describe themselves. Those were my first ways into the world of the play, and on top of that, I did a lot of research looking at Greek history, things that would have been around during that time, making sure that all of my references in the play fit that Grecian landscape and history and time, focusing on Greek root words in the words that I use in the play, all that sort of stuff. So then it just branched out. At the time I was in Houston, so I was just in my bachelor days in Houston. I had a lot of solitude to myself, and so I could hunker down and chisel out these verses.”
One source of inspiration for Quintero was the landmark musical Hamilton, which continues to sell out performances on Broadway. He admitted to being obsessed with the retelling of Alexander Hamilton’s story through rap and hip hop, and he wanted to mimic some of that creative energy.
“Hamilton just came out when I graduated school,” he said. “I graduated college in 2016, so when I first moved to the city, that was the big thing that everybody had their dreams on, auditioning and being a part of Hamilton. And I auditioned, and I never got it. I got close to final callbacks, but I don’t think I had the dancing chops to really make it in the rotation, or whatever reason.”
He added: “First, I started just doing all the raps from Hamilton like on a playlist in my car until I had them stone cold, and then I would do the instrumentals just so I could be ready for the next time I was called. But then when I realized I didn’t know when that next call would happen, I started writing my own raps and dissecting raps from artists that I really admired and respected like Eminem, Immortal Technique and KRS-One.”
To bring Medea to life, he would put himself in the mind of one of the characters — perhaps Medea herself, who in the show is played by Sarin Monae West — and he would start freestyling.
“I would try to get saturated into the point of view of the characters and then freestyle my way into a moment and then pick out the best parts,” Quintero said. “Other times I had to be very deliberate. What is the metaphor that I’m crafting here? What is the punchline that I want it to land on? And how can I tie the punchline into the thematics of the metaphor and make sure that metaphor can still fit both in the Grecian world to the characters, but from a modern perspective we can appreciate from a different lens as contemporary listeners. So everything went through that second draft of making sure that everything had a double entendre, but a lot of the first passes were freestyles that I recorded or attempts to just make stuff up when I felt the music or the beat, and then taking the best parts and sculpting it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Medea: Re-Versed, written by and featuring Luis Quintero, continues through Sept. 2 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. The production transfers to Red Bull Theater in Manhattan later this year. Click here for more information and tickets.
