Brilliant! This play presents itself in a short, simple way, but still seems to be beautifully complex. It reads like some sort of car accident; you only have a few moments to figure out what’s going on before you feel the entire force of it hit you. And then it’s over. Medea.

The clever part is that Medea herself seems to represent more then just one state of being. Yes, she is manipulative, malicious, and an emotional extremist who kills her children. But she is not without remorse, and many a time she would come into conflict with herself; wavering between thoughts of vengeance and those engrained notions of morality that everybody feels. In this course we seem to be searching out the very “human” monster. Well, here it is. The type of monster we can understand just before we recoil from. A monster that reads like a human is the most scary monster of all.

An important thing for me was how universal the struggles of Medea were. She talks of the “ceaseless work” of raising children, the “unending pain” of what was then a male dominated society. These are challenges that would continue to plague womankind for hundreds of years, and still do in many places. Although the context of Jason is noteable, (his heroism and such) you could substitute him for any other chap who is unfaithful to his wife and marries another, and the result would be pretty much the same. Jason is by no means innocent. He wronged his wife and broke his vows, but there was a certain obliviousness to how he did it, a certain transparency to his lies. In searching for a monster I looked elsewhere.

What IS different is the way that Medea reacts to her betrayal. Something here made me look at the idea of vengeance much more closely then I have before.  I must have read or watched hundreds of stories where the plot is driven by revenge. Often such a story will end with a moral message that sounds something like “If you spend all your time looking for revenge, when you finally get it you won’t have anything left to fulfill you.”  This type of idea usually works well when the hero has lost everything. Except Medea DID have something else. She had children she loved, she had a place to go, she probably could have pulled her life together.

For me, that is the most fascinating thing about this whole work. It wasn’t simply the act of betrayal that destroyed Medea’s life, it was her anger at such a crime. It consumed her and gave her a sort of desperation to do something, anything. He took a little bit, and she ended up taking the rest herself.