MEDEA

BY COUNTEE CULLEN

A successful new approach to this very old myth was the result of an intense collaboration with director Daniel Banks that took us down many avenues.

Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen's previously unproduced version of Medea fleshes out Euripides' play. He adds both a prologue showing Jason and Medea's initial passionate meeting and elopement from Colchis, her island home, and an epilogue in Athens, where, after the massacre at Corinth, Medea takes refuge in royal splendor as the wife of Aegeus.

We started out with the idea of removing the auditorium seating and making this the performance area. The audience would sit on bleachers facing the auditorium. We explored the enormous depth of this playing space and how it would permit us to depict the great distances between the play's three locales. A visual vocabulary developed that defined the basic design concept:

• The Prologue would be performed as a journey to Medea's new home.
• The tragic conflict with Jason and its bloody results would be rooted in realistic dusty soil.
• The Epilogue would unfold in an opulent world of precious metal.

Legal, economic, logistical and technical considerations eventually forced us to stay with a conventional audience-stage arrangement, but the overall concept did not change. To achieve some of the distance, we were able to build an extension starting at the edge of the stage over half of the auditorium. The design for the prologue evoked the feeling of a journey with the use of transparent panels inspired by Zen gardens (a, b) and a zig-zag configuration of platforms. This path led to a mound of earth on the stage floor where the children come to their bloody end. Prior to the epilogue, sweepers cleared the dirt (powdered cork) to reveal a golden mosaic circle above which the royal thrones were positioned. The effective results we achieved prove that limitations can lead to favorable solutions.