"Medea," Again and Again

Medea has been performed countless times since its debut at the City Dionysia festival in 431 BCE. In each iteration, the end results remain preordained: The titular character, spurned by her husband, the hero Jason, murders his new bride and her own children before fleeing for Athens aboard a divine chariot.

But now, through the vision of former visiting professor and theater maker Jack Issac Pryor, Euripides’ best-known tragedy is getting a new treatment, one that would repeat the play every hour for 24 hours in search of a different outcome. In this new production, Pryor asks, can repetition, shifting roles, and the contingency of liveness in theater avoid the ultimate violence that Medea’s narrative leads to?

“I became really interested in Medea as this container for thinking through how to truly interrupt cycles of violence and if the medium of theater, which is both scripted and live and sits at the intersection of fate and free will, could be a place to experiment with those questions,” says Pryor.

Supported by the Provost's Distinguished Visitors Program, the Ethical Inquiry & Initiatives Fund, and the English Department's Weaver Fund, Pryor returned to campus this fall as an artist-in-residence embedded in Associate Professor and Chair of English Lindsay Reckson’s “Performance, Literature, and the Archive” class, hoping to suss out answers for their project, aptly titled 24H Medea. For several weeks, the class was strictly focused on Medea and the numerous issues — patriarchy, ethnic nationalism, migration — the play surfaces.

“Students are really receptive to this idea that we don’t have to reproduce what we inherit and are grappling with that and what that means for each of them individually, but also what it means for them as members of a community,” Reckson says of Medea’s resonance. “So I think the play really hit for that reason in this particular moment.”

It was in 2017, while teaching at Haverford, that Pryor really engaged with Medea beyond required reading. They had just published their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History, and were keen to continue exploring how performance can shift the way we perceive trauma, time, and history.

They were struck by the play’s opening lines, delivered by Medea’s nurse, that establish the importance of temporality in the work. In them, the nurse laments the sailing of Jason’s ship, the Argo, on his quest for the golden fleece, implying that the entire tragedy was set in motion years before the central characters even met. Time itself even ripples throughout the play, Pryor says. It unfolds over a diegetic 24-hour period, and Medea capitalizes on the day-long grace period preceding her scheduled exile to enact vengeance.

“There’s this really strange tension in the play between something being fated, but also the possibility that it could be averted,” Pryor says. “But, of course, it can’t be averted because it’s a play. It’s scripted. It’s rehearsed. There’s not going to be another ending. That’s how theater works. You put on the play as it is written.”

But, as Pryor and Reckson note, theater’s inherent liveness means anything can happen, hence their desire to present it repeatedly to see what, if anything, shakes out. Reckson’s students, they say, were true thought partners in advancing the production, which Pryor hopes to continue to develop through other college workshops and artist residencies. Beyond their broad discussions and observations in the classroom, students also assisted Pryor with a series of open rehearsals held in the Dining Center’s black box theater in late October.

“They were a really positive presence in the room, and having witnesses in the room is always helpful,” Pryor says. “The presence of interested interlocutors who are bearing witness and interested in the theatrical experiment and the intellectual questions that the project engages just raises the bar for everybody.”