| layout | title | permalink | gallery | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
post |
Media/Medea |
/play |
|
Amid the searing canon of Greek tragedies, Euripides’ Medea must be one of the most shocking. Medea is the foreigner who leaves everything behind her to follow a lover who then betrays her. She is the mother who decides that the best revenge is to kill her own children. And the gods do not punish her, they reward and rescue her.
By the time Seneca wrote his own version of Medea more than four centuries after Euripides, the story was so well established that when Medea said, “I shall become Medea,” everyone knew what that meant: The play would move forward to its inevitable, terrible end, and there would be two small bloody corpses on the stage.
Modern versions of Medea tend to play with the foreigner motif. They find new ways to portray Medea as an outsider and hence to explain or condemn her violent actions. We asked James Ijames to write an adaptation that put Black lives at the center of the story. We wondered if that would mean a story about otherness and race.
Nothing that predictable. Ijames’ take on the story is wholly original. At our first meeting he said, “I want to tell the story from the point of view of the children.” It is a breathtaking reversal of the narrative. And he has followed through. Ijames centers Black lives in the simple sense that this is a Black family—and in the complicated sense that this is an exceptional Black family, Black royalty, under constant scrutiny. That gives us our chorus of social media users, and our title Media/Medea. And it gives us our haunted sense of how terrible the stakes are, and how terrible the tensions swirling around these two children who just want to live their adolescent lives.
{% include gallery.html %}
Medea: Monet Debose
Jason: Akeem Davis
Devan: Jayson Brown
Shel: Génesis Woods
Circe: Maria Del Pilar Rodriguez & Bethany Wisdom
Glauce: Regan Riehl
Chorus Leader: Michael Jahlil
Chorus:
- Elizabeth Brown
- Minh Doan
- Lulu Florea
- Isiah Jessie
- Bina Lee
- Stirling Lewis
- Zakkai Mares-Van Praag
- Chrisantin Natisha
- Ella Wu
- IV Yim
Producer: Catharine Slusar
Producer: Catherine Conybeare
Producer & Production Coordinator: Quinn Eli
Director: Raelle Myrick Hodges
Scenic & Costume Designer: Maiko Matsushima
Lighting Designer: Isabella Gill-Gomez
Sound Designer: Natali Merrill
Properties Designer & Coordinator: Saria Rosenhaj
Technical Director: Justin McDaniel (Bryn Mawr & Haverford Colleges)
Technical Director & Production Manager: Newton Buchanan (Community College of Philadelphia)
Instructor in Technical Theater: Jonathan Pappas (Community College of Philadelphia)
Production Manager: Amy Radbill (Bryn Mawr & Haverford Colleges)
Stage Manager: Anne Meyer
Assistant Stage Manager: Cricket Bradford
Assistant Scenic Designer: Kay Strine
Lead Electrician: Ella Namour
Sound Engineer: Ophelia Evans
Assistant to the Director: Wura Oni
Run Crew: Leo Anderman & Carolyn Schwartz
Production Assistant: Tova Just