Thoughts on Site: The Jessop West Decision

My initial concept for my Medea project was a tableaux/dance piece done in the Theatre Workshop with film noir movie clips showing people alternately kissing and violent acts with key phrases from the text interposed on top of it.

After reading Dario Fo and Franca Rame's Medea, I felt that while their one woman play was compelling and certainly caught the essence of Euripides' original script, it was missing fragments. One reason for this was when I recalled a conversation with Elizabeth shortly after we first read the piece where she felt some sympathy for Jason initially. She pointed to lines of dialogue where Jason explains that what he was doing was best for the family and his offers to help Medea and the children with letters of introduction, etc. Personally, when I read those sections, I felt Jason was probably lying. However, by omitting these aspects of the dialogue, Fo and Rame removed a fragment of the essence of the play. Is Jason an entirely self-centered bastard, telling his wife anything to appease her long enough to get away and marry his new wife?  Or is that just a modern reading of the text? Is Jason actually engaging in a useful political alliance that would've benefited Medea and their sons in the end? Questions like this flesh out the story a little and add to it.

From there, I started to think about what stories are like when you only see them in bits. What if the only part of the play you knew was Jason's argument that his actions were in the family's best interest? What if you only knew the Messenger's recitation of the events at the palace? Can anyone ever know a story in its entirety?

At that point I started to think about separating each aspect of the performance into self-contained moments, an experiment in whether or not someone can get the accurate feel of something from a splintered collection of moments.

I realized that through the dance/tableaux, I wanted to show a "Cliffnotes" version of the story, using the other aspects to flesh out this main event. The film noir/key word movie was then better used as two different aspects instead of one combined. The key words, viewed separate from the dance/tableaux, emphasized the key moments stressed in the text. The film noir then evolved into a montage of happy moments from Medea and Jason's marriage, in a way paying homage to Jason's statements (true or not) about making decisions in their best interest and accenting the horror of Medea's decisions.

I was left with the question of how to show each of these aspects in a distinct, yet connected way and found that answer in Jessop West. On the 1st Floor, there are 4 circular holes in the floor that let you look down to the Ground Floor. By standing in the center of them, the audience should be able to move easily from hole to hole and view the difference aspects of the piece as they occur in a way that will break the piece down but provide an overall concept.