Spanish playwright gives Medea a makeover
By hola | Published | No Comments
Even before show time on opening night last Friday, the audience got a hint of the subject matter of “Medea’s Got Some Issues,” a play about women’s troubles—both ancient and modern.
Two tall penis shaped columns accented with gold ropes stood in the center of the black box theater. The phallic symbols were among the few props in the one-woman play that uses comedy, parenthetical remarks and digression to discuss such loaded issues as politics, sex, hierarchies, gender roles, and love.
Written by Emilio Williams, one of Spain’s most popular playwrights, “Medea’s Got Some Issues” has just begun a two-week run at Washington’s Warehouse Theater as part of the Capital Fringe Festival.
Lisa Hodsoll, playing the title role, bounces between parallel storylines. She is Medea from Greek mythology, granddaughter of the sun god, Helios, but best remembered for having killed her own children after her husband left her for a younger princess. But she is also an actress, a starving artist who wants bigger parts in theaters more prestigious than “an old warehouse in the back of a bar,” Hodsoll confides in the audience.
Such comedic asides and real-life references are woven throughout the play. This Medea, for instance, makes reference to a more recent Medea story—the trial of Casey Anthony, a Florida woman acquitted in 2011 of killing her two-year-old daughter.
Last year, the play won “Best International Show” at United Solo Festival in New York City. But every time it’s presented in a new city, Williams says he writes new references, jokes, and punchlines tailored to the location. He also inserts elements of pop culture, mentioning, for instance, that Medea should be on “Real Housewives of Corinth.”
The actress character, meanwhile, talks about her struggle to land larger roles because she doesn’t conform to Hollywood’s ideas of what a woman should look like. So she opts to portray real life without the melodrama and musical interludes of big box office productions such as “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” another Capital Fringe Fest offering that also opened last Friday night.
“This play is actress-specific, city-specific and venue-specific, so I adapt it every time,” Williams told the Washington Post.
Hodsoll plays her Medea with a quick temper, bitter sarcasm and dark humor.
“In this role,” Williams told the Post of Hodsoll, “Lisa is like having a panther in your living room. You’re scared, but you can’t look away.”
The juxtaposing of the original story of Greek mythology with that of a struggling actress allows discussion of sex and gender throughout the ages.
In 431 B.C., Medea notes, she had no reproductive freedom and was forced to give birth twice—and without epidural.”How would things be different,” she asks, “if things were the other way around, and men could get pregnant?” Returning to 2014, Medea launches into a diatribe about the obstacles facing women in business, suggesting that some women resort to trading sexual favors in desperate attempts to get ahead. An option, she adds gingerly, less available if you’re not “busty.”
Combining a legend and a current story suggests that power struggles over women’s bodies and careers have changed little over the centuries. While women have gained more rights, the playwright is apparently pointing out, they somehow still fall short of power.
—Bria Baylor
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