Medusa

Medusa was once the hottest hottie in all of ancient Greece. Men and gods maxed out their credit cards buying her chocolate and bouquets and tickets to Jay-Z concerts. One day, while she was praying at the Temple of Athena, the sea god Poseidon’s resistance broke, and he raped her in that place of worship. Athena flipped her lid at the defiling of her temple. But Poseidon was her hella powerful uncle, able to summon tsunamis and killer whales, so Athena unleashed her rage on poor Medusa. And what did Athena do? She cursed Medusa, and Medusa’s skin grew scaly, and her hands grew claws, and her face shriveled up, and all of her hair fell out, and venomous snakes grew out of her scalp. Medusa became so hideous, that men, women, even animals would turn to stone when they looked at her. So naturally, everyone gave Medusa a wide berth. No one would look at her as she walked through the Greek countryside. In fact, they’d hightail it in the other direction. She grew despondent, and bitter, and fled into a cave. She brooded here until a young cat named Perseus, on a dare from a king who secretly wanted him dead, came to kill her. Normally, this would be impossible, because Medusa would have turned Perseus to stone in an instant. But Perseus came decked out with hella magical weapons and tools from Athena and her divine brother Hermes. So with his cap of invisibility and his mirror shield which allowed him to look at her reflection safely, and with his razor-sharp sword, Perseus cut off Medusa’s head while she slept. And he then flew around the Mediterranean using her head to turn monsters, warlords, and corrupt politicians to stone.

In Beauty Secrets, Andrew Saito contemporizes the myth of Medusa. “If you dig into that figure, you learn several surprising things: her origins, like those of many Greek deities, lie in North African religions; she was once beautiful before Athena, enraged that Poseidon raped Medusa in her temple, transformed her into a scaled, serpent-haired creature; and Perseus, the hero who slays Medusa, wasn’t very heroic at all, assisted as he was by various gods, seers, and a host of magical weapons and tools. He even slew Medusa in her sleep. One question driving my writing is: given that all flee her visage, to whom can Medusa turn for love and sex? I will fascinate the audience by plunging into the complexity of these characters. I want us to upend our assumptions of heroism and monstrosity, and in the end have us see the heroism in the monster and the monstrosity in the hero.”

MEDUSA or BEAUTY SECRETS by Andrew Saito *
Directed by Rem Myers
Staged Reading on November 21, 2014

Nkechi Emeruwa (Medusa)

Vince Faso (Stage Directions/Additional Roles)

Kate Robards (Thena)

Paul Rodrigues (Percy)

Andrew Saito has eaten insects on three different continents. He is Resident Playwright at The Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, where Rob Melrose directed his play Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night in May 2013. He is currently developing several more plays with Cutting Ball. Andrew has studied, worked and lived in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Papua New Guinea, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing in 2012. Andrew holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, where he received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, as well as a Stanley Award to conduct research for a play about the period Langston Hughes spent living in Mexico, a Kenneth J. Cmiel Human Rights grant to teach playwriting in Mayan communities Guatemala, and the Richard Maibaum Dramatic Writing Award for his script Dance of Pawns, about the internment of Japanese Peruvians in Texas during World War II. He has collaborated with the Andean theatre company Kusiwasi, and the legendary Peruvian theatre collective Yuyachkani. He has received grants from Theater Bay Area, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, and has developed work with Mu Performing Arts, Brava Theater, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Asian American Theatre Company, and Mixed Phoenix Theatre in New York. Andrew has taught playwriting at the University of Iowa, and with Kearny Street Workshop, WritersCorps, Peforming Arts Workshop, ArtCorps, and at Montalvo Arts Center, where he held a Teaching Artist Fellowship. Additionally, Andrew was a Core Apprentice at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, and is currently a member Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwrights Initiative, Just Theater’s Writer-Director Lab, and PlayGround’s Writers Pool.

* Beauty Secrets by Andrew Saito was co-commissioned by the Cutting Ball Theater where Saito is the current Andrew Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence.