Staging Medea's Chorus

I just saw the Argus Eyes production of Medea at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City. Staging a Greek chorus in a modern-dress production can often be a challenge, but director Mason Beggs found some interesting ways to make it work.

Argus Eyes used the new Robin Robertson translation, which was first published in 2008. The opening passage, given by Euripides to the nurse, instead came over the loud speaker:

                    If only it had never happened like this.
                    If the Argo hadn't opened its sails and flown
                    to Colchis through the Clashing Rocks.
                    If the pines were still standing
                    in the glens of Mount Pelion,
                    not cut and turned 
                    to oars for the Argonauts.
                    If Pelias the king hadn't sent those heroes
                    off to do his bidding, to cross the sea
                    and steal the Golden Fleece.
                    It would all be different. Not as it is.

Periodically, the production returns to the loudspeaker device, which makes sense, as audiences today are more familiar with voiceovers in movies than with soliloquies addressed on stage to an audience.

This first passage, however, is not a from the chorus. The choral lines, if I am not mistaken, were divided among characters listed in the program as "Maid" and "Handmaiden" and--most interestingly--Agathe.

Agathe? I don't remember a character with that name in Medea. But Beggs creates a nosey neighbor who comes over bearing cupcakes and scant comfort for Medea. Why she is named Agathe, I'm not sure, but the device works.

Of course, the chorus in Euripides is usually more peripheral than it is in Aeschylus or Sophocles. The star of this play is clearly Medea, as comes through in Robertson's translation. In one passage, Medea eloquently laments:

                    Of all living, sentient creatures,
                    women are the most unfortunate.
                    We must save and raise a dowry;
                    then the man agrees to marry us
                    becomes master of our bodies:
                    a second burden greater than the first.
                    Loss and insult: that is all we have.

If you'd like to see this production, you have two more chances: Saturday at 2:00 and then again at 7:00 at the Roy Irving Theatre at Saint Peter's University.

Was Medea African?

I was speaking yesterday with playwright and theatre scholar Dr. Henry Miller. He mentioned that when he was defending his dissertation back in 2003, he mentioned in passing that Medea was an African.

"What?" cried a member of his committee. "Medea wasn't an African. Medea came from Colchis. Isn't Colchis in Asia?

Fortunately, another member of his committee came to his rescue. "Actually, Colchis used to be ruled by the Egyptians," she said. "Medea could very well have been an African." He was saved.

So where is Colchis, anyway? Well, from a Greek perspective, it was at the ends of the earth. The ancient land of Colchis was in the Caucasian region on the far side of the Black Sea from Greece.

This is around where the present nation of Georgia is today, which might seem like an awful long way for the Egyptians to have traveled, but the Greek writer Herodotus thought differently.

According to Herodotus, the Colchians and the Egyptians were of the same race, and he linked both groups to the Ethiopians, in that all three were among the first to practice circumcision.

Here's what Herodotus says in Book Two of his Histories, in the 1890 translation by George Campbell Macaulay:

For the people of Colchis are evidently Egyptian, and this I perceived for myself before I heard it from others. So when I had come to consider the matter I asked them both; and the Colchians had remembrance of the Egyptians more than the Egyptians of the Colchians; but the Egyptians said they believed that the Colchians were a portion of the army of Sesostris.

Sesostis was a great pharaoh who according to Herodotus conquered "every nation which stood in his way." Herodotus goes on to describe the Colchians, noting "they are dark-skinned and have curly hair." Moreover, they share a number of Egyptian customs, and their language closely resembles Egyptian, Herodotus writes.

So whether the Colchians actually were African or not, Greek playwrights like Euripides probably thought of them as African, or at least as related to Africans. Today, we tend not to think of Medea as an African, but from the perspective of the Greeks, Dr. Miller was absolutely right.

Possibility of Imagination

Cherríe Moraga begins the printed version of her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea with a quote from the German feminist Christa Wolf:

Where can I go?
is it possible to imagine a world,
a time, where I would have a place?
There’s no one to ask.
That’s my answer.

For Moraga, it is not only impossible to create world that accepts her--it is impossible to even imagine such a world.

The Hungry Woman takes place in the future, after the failure of a utopian state known as Aztlán that was supposed to create a homeland for people of indigenous ancestry living in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. In her notes for the program, Moraga states that “Rebels scorned the ballot box” and that after the revolution individuals without native blood were “permitted to reside” in the new country, but the right to hold land was generally reserved for people who could certify they had native ancestry. Those who were not ethnically native in this non-democratic state were essentially second-class citizens, permitted to live (at least for now) within the borders of the native homeland.

Substitute “German” for “native” in this scenario, and the supposedly utopian state of Aztlán begins to sound an awful lot like the Third Reich. Though Moraga is sympathetic toward her fictional revolution, she makes the parallels between Aztlán and Nazi Germany fairly explicit. The character of Chac-Mool is also named Adolfo, a clear reference to Adolf Hitler, and in a conversation with a Border Guard, Chac-Mool claims, “I was born to be a Nazi, to have a Nazi life.” The fascist turns both he and the nation take in the play are inherent from the beginning. When a revolution is founded on an inborn ethnic link to the land--or “blood and soil” as the Nazis put it--how can anything go right?

What Moraga seems to be expressing is an inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world. Like Christa Wolf, she sees no political movement of the past that has been able to create a place for people like her. There is no one to ask how something could be done, so the implied conclusion is that nothing can be done. Women like Moraga’s Medea are condemned to always dwell on the borders, never truly finding a place for themselves. A world where they might find happiness cannot even be imagined.

This inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world, also haunts Nilo Cruz’s new play Sotto Voce, which closed recently at Theater for the New City. The character of Bermadette, though a famous novelist, is unable to write about the fate of her former lover Ariel who failed to escape from Germany on the eve of World War II and was in all likelihood murdered during the Holocaust.

Bermadette, it seems, needs to tell Ariel’s story, to imagine him on the ship leaving Germany, and to perhaps dream of what his life might have been like had he escaped. Paralyzed with guilt and regret, she walls herself up in her Manhattan apartment, unable to leave, and also unable to write anything new. She knows that Ariel is almost certainly dead and that there are no other reasonable possibilities, so she cannot even fantasize about his possible life. Yet this inability to dream prevents her from living her own life as well.

Cruz offers a way out for Bermadette by introducing the character of Saquiel, a young Cuban writer trying to get the governments of the U.S. and Cuba to apologize for not taking in refugees from the S.S. St. Louis, the ship that carried Ariel back in 1939. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of politics must know that getting the governments of the United States and Cuba to issue a joint apology for anything is nothing other than a dream, but at least Saquiel has a dream. He relentlessly stalks Bermadette, calling, sending her electronic messages, and even standing outside her apartment building. Gradually, Bermadette warms to the young man. She even takes to calling him “Ariel.” Through Saquiel, Bermadette is able to enter an imaginative space where Ariel did in fact live.

For a writer like Moraga or Wolf, the creation of such an imaginary world might seem pointless and escapist. In Cruz’s play, however, it is Bermadette’s salvation. By remembering Ariel again and imagining him alive, she is presumably able to break through her writer’s block, which has yielded only pages and pages that she has thrown away as trash. She is also able to enjoy life again and venture beyond the confines of her apartment. The final image Cruz leaves us with is Bermadette dreaming of Ariel (played by the same actor as Saquiel) sailing off into a dreaming sunset—a happy ending that never was but that is necessary for her own psyche.

Franca Sofia Barchiesi as Bermadette and Andhy Mendez as Saquiel in Sotto Voce by Nilo Cruz. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.