The Getty Villa's new amphitheater offers Hippolytos, Euripides's take on the tragic lust a stepmother feels for her young adult stepson. A Noise Within brings us the same story, as told by the 17th-century French playwright Jean Racine under the title Phaedra. And City Garage is producing Charles L. Mee's modern meditation on Euripides's orgiastic The Bacchae.

For unbridled sexual expression, including nudity, try The Bacchae. By contrast, the scripts about Phaedra and her stepson are more about sexual repression and anxiety. The queen is afraid of her itch for Hippolytos, and he's repulsed by it.

Euripides's first version of Hippolytos was too explicit for Athenian tastes. He rewrote it, but Anne Carson's new translation of the rewrite might still raise a few eyebrows, especially in the new, non-verbal scene at the beginning. Hippolytos (Paul Moore) is hunting, alone, when he discovers a rural lass washing her clothes. She proudly displays her breasts to him (but not to the audience). He turns away.

Hippolytos is in thrall to Artemis (Blake Lindsley), the virgin goddess of the hunt. His holier-than-thou attitude toward sex infuriates Aphrodite (Sarah Ripard), the love goddess. She takes revenge by arousing the hots for Hippolytos in his father's current wife, Phaedra (delirious Linda Purl).

The gods are visibly active at the beginning and the end of Euripides's play. Aphrodite's on the audience's left and Artemis is on our right in Stephen Sachs's staging. Human beings are pawns of these larger forces. It's an especially appropriate emphasis in this vast outdoor venue. At the reviewed performance, the real moon took its place in the set design. Austin Switser's wide-angle projections of ocean imagery resonated with the fact that everyone drove by the sea en route to the theater.

The production is more majestic than moving, but Fran Bennett's feckless nurse adds a vital element of human feeling – and comedy. David O's a cappella arrangements for the Greek chorus evoke mystery and melancholy.

No god is on stage in Racine's Phaedra, staged rather severely by Sabin Epstein, using Richard Wilbur's translation and mostly present-day dress. People seem more personally responsible for their own problems. This is especially true of the title character (formidable Jenna Cole). In this version, Hippolytos (mop-topped J. Todd Adams) isn't the ranting misogynist that he is in Euripides's text. Here, he has a girlfriend, closer to his own age than Phaedra, which makes the queen feel all the worse. He isn't rejecting women in general – he's just not into her.

This emphasis on interior nuances is as right for A Noise Within's intimate venue as the bigger picture is for the Getty stage. Now, if only we could persuade the Wooster Group to return to town immediately with its ironic deconstruction of the same story, To You, the Birdie! It might make more sense in the context of these other productions than it did at UCLA's Freud Playhouse in 2002, when there wasn't any other version of the story in town.

Still, for a postmodern reaction to Euripides, Mee's The Bacchae is better than Birdie! This is the tale in which the sensual Dionysus (Justin Davanzo) and his women disciples take on buttoned-down Pentheus (Troy Dunn) and his male aides. Euripides explored both the glory and the grief of walking on the wild side. Mee adds American, contemporary references and plenty of graphic sex talk, but in director Frédérique Michel's bewitching staging, the tragedy still feels timeless.

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