"There's a bold concept behind BackStage Theatre Company's production of Euripides' classic: Jason is played by deaf actor Chris Lopez while the scorned, vengeful Medea can hear. The conceit pays off intermittently in Michael Pacas's staging. Using the two children as ASL translators for their parents' battles makes it clear they're tragic pawns; it's especially poignant when the daughter delivers Jason's encomiums to his son--praise that she's denied. Karen Yates's performance as Medea blends slyness with feral passion, and Lopez's anguish at the end is chilling. But the supporting cast tends to be bland, and the pace is slow: swifter action that feels more inexorable would have driven home the horrors wrought by blind hate and pride". - Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader 7/6/06

"Director Michael Pacas has hit upon an ingenious idea: Make Euripides? spurned heroine Medea (Yates) a hearing character; make her betraying husband Jason (Lopez) deaf; and then have their two kids?caught between them?function as their parents? interpreters: speaking to one, signing to the other. The linguistic gulf manifests the emotional chasm between Jason, ditching Medea to start up a new family, and Medea, so undone by her rejected love for Jason that she kills their kids to spite him. Now all that Pacas?s brilliant conceit needs is an equally brilliant production. Because the performances achieve showy solemnity without genuine gravity, the signing (especially the chorus?s) often seems like a stunt. Yet two moments suggest its expressive potential: A signing messenger tells how Medea?s poisoned gifts gruesomely killed Jason?s new wife, and in the end, a wrecked Jason signs his grief alone, with no one to translate. Signing or no, Medea always rests on Medea, an actor who embodies the primal emotions of a woman whose fierce passion exceeds her maternal devotion. But Yates is a strangely casual Medea, remotely bitter yet never wildly angry enough to take her to the final annihilation she enacts on everyone she loves. Odder still, Pacas has cast adult actors as the kids, diminishing the pathos of their deaths. It?s tough to feel too much sympathy for grown-ups who clearly could?ve taken their murderous mom down" - Novid Parsi TimeOut Chicago 06/29/06