Medea
Among the most formidable heroines of Greek mythology, Medea is almost exclusively known today for one chapter in her story, and one that not many ancient sources include as part of her story at all. In the modern world, if she’s known at all it’s for murdering her own children to punish her husband, Jason, for abandoning and banishing her so that he could make a more advantageous marriage. And that’s the power of playwriting. We know this story because that’s the version that Euripides told in his tragedy Medea, but that’s not the way other ancient Greek writers tell it. Some say she killed her children accidentally, and others say she didn’t kill them at all. But whether this story was Euripides’ invention or a minor variant he popularized, now that’s the one thing she’s known for. But Medea did so much more. She’s one of the great heroes of the Argonautica, the one who makes it possible for Jason to steal the Golden Fleece from her father, the king of Colchis (now part of the former Soviet republic of Georgia). A powerful sorceress and granddaughter of the sun, Medea’s the one who enables Jason to accomplish all the heroic labors demanded of him to win the Fleece. Then to help her newfound lover escape, she kills and dismembers her brother to keep her father occupied. She’s the one who kills the bronze man Talos, and who heals the Argonauts Atalanta and Heracles. She tricks the daughters of Jason’s enemy Pelias into killing their father, telling them that if they cut him to pieces and put him in a magic pot he would grow young again. Even in Euripides’ version, his tragedy is far from the end of her story. She simply leaves town, to marry again, have at least one more child, get driven out of several more cities, kill more people and save others, and possibly become the founder of a civilization.
That’s what inspired Sam Hurwitt to take on the imposing topic of Medea for his third SF Olympians play (after writing about Helen of Troy in 2013 and Penelope, Circe and Calypso in 2014). There’s so much more of Medea’s story to tell, after she leaves Jason (while Jason has nothing left to do but die alone). “I was interested in looking at what is the end of Medea’s story,” Hurwitt says. “There are many versions, but only the roughest outlines of them. Where do you go after a life like that? Where’s Medea’s Oedipus at Colonus? Well, this won’t be that, lord knows, but I want to explore a very different face of Medea than people have seen before.” All three of these plays about great women of Greek mythology are ultimately about choosing your own destiny in a world where everyone knows that their fate has already been written, and nobody embodies that struggle more than Medea. She is not and has never been Greek, these are not her rules, and she’s not going to play by them.
MEDEA or KILL YOUR DARLINGS by SAM HURWITT
Directed by Evren Odcikin
Staged Reading on November 13, 2015
Melissa Claire (Circe/Atalanta)
Alisha Ehrlich (Eriopis/Glauce)
Dan Kurtz (Thessalus/Medus/Absyrtus)
Brian Levi (Herakles/Phraortes)
Charisse Loriaux (Medea)
Heather Shaw (Stage Directions)
The former editor-in-chief of Theatre Bay Area magazine, Sam Hurwitt is a theater critic for KQED Arts, Marin Independent Journal and San Jose Mercury News and other Bay Area News Group Papers. In his by no means copious spare time, he writes The Idiolect, a theater and comics blog where he writes about Wonder Woman every week. Born and bred in Berkeley, Sam has in various past lives been the arts editor for the East Bay Express and film editor for Kitchen Sink magazine, and written for a zillion publications from the San Francisco Chronicle to Salon to the Budapest Sun. Somehow he manages to find time to write the occasional short story or play. His fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Misfit Library, Defunkt magazine and the Doubleday anthology Voices of the Xiled. This is his third San Francisco Olympians play, after the full-length Ellen’s Undone in 2013, about Helen of Troy and Menelaus, and the short The Weavers in 2014, excerpted from a full-length play about Penelope, Circe and Calypso. This year he looks forward to completing his first Greek trilogy.
The image for Medea was created by Emily C. Martin!