Medea in Brooklyn

Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale would like you to please refer to them as “lovers.” Right now, they’re co-starring in an avant-garde take on a Greek tragedy at BAM.

- Jackson McHenry

IN A BARE ROOM, Rose Byrne approaches Bobby Cannavale with a painting. It’s a gift that is also clearly a ploy to get back into his life. They talk about their kids and vaguely of her recovery from some kind of trauma. She pretends to be better, while he pretends there wasn’t something between them, though their history sizzles in the air. He’s seeing someone else now. She claims to be over it, yet she can’t help but bring it up. “This isn’t a good conversation,” he says. “It’s not the best, it’s not the worst,” she counters. It’s like watching them pick at a rash when they know they shouldn’t, until it inflames, pustulates, and then kills them.

Byrne, 40, and Cannavale, 49, are rehearsing the first scene in Simon Stone’s adaptation of Medea at bam. When the scene ends, Cannavale, as if to annotate his performance, tells Stone he was “thinking about the way sex is on the table” between the characters. “I feel as if it’s there,” Stone says. “And the sadness of it also not being possible.” Stone, who is directing, too, likes having them run through the scene in rehearsal to develop a sense of their characters’ shared past together.