Euripides's Medea is all about female rage. You likely know the story, which he based on an older Greek myth: a woman is angered by her husband's infidelity and kills her children, his lover, and his lover's father.

It's a rich vein to mine for theater, and there have been many adaptations, most focusing either on women's oppression (suffragettes regularly recited one of the speeches at their meetings) or on Medea's role as an outsider fighting against the elite. In other words, Medea is usually seen as a play that's not just about the horrors one woman commits, but about how society has forced her to commit them.

But in director Simon Stone's brisk modern adaptation, Medea (here called Anna and played by Rose Byrne) is, well, just crazy. From the very beginning, as she leaves a mental institution, we can see that her mouth is drawn up into a rictus of a smile; her sweet tone of voice doesn't match her wild-eyed face. Because we know how the story ends, the portrayal is distancing. We see immediately how manipulative she is of her estranged husband Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and her technology-loving children (Orson Hong and Jolly Swag). We're never on her side.

This is a surprise, because Stone's adaptation and direction of a Federico García Lorca play at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago was also about a woman falling apart — and it was a devastating primal scream, one of the most viscerally haunting works I've seen on a stage. When the protagonist in that show tore herself apart, she tore at us, too.

But this Medea is more stylish than snarling.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of good ideas here. Bob Cousins's set is a shining white box capped by a large video screen, which makes the play feel both mythic and contemporary at once. And toward the end, black ashes sift down from the ceiling like Satanic feathers, a chilling symbol of the complete destruction of a family. More importantly, Anna is not an outsider, but a brainy research scientist who helped her husband create expensive pharmaceuticals before he took all the credit for himself. Byrne's ferocious monologue about losing that powerful position is the one great, true-feeling scene in the play. Cannavale is superb, playing Lucas with a barely restrained violence. We can infer that he may have been abusive and that's why Anna wound up in a mental institution, but Stone doesn't draw those connections strongly enough.

Stone also doesn't let us get to know the two boys. Instead, they are just props, draped around the stage to provide a counterpoint to Anna's insanity. When Anna herself uses them as props for her revenge — we're not moved. 

Medea, based on Euripides's play, written and directed by Simon Stone, at BAM through March 8.