Argonautika
Shakespeare Theatre
Deep, agonizing, uncontrollable emotional pain can be understood fully only by those who have experienced it. We can relate to those who experience such pain only if we, too, have known it, only if our own souls have felt the depths of such agony and despair.
Medea felt such pain. She felt its horror sweep over her and sear her soul, a horror that could not be eased, no matter how much she desired. She felt the uncontrollable, unquenchable emotional need to respond to her pain by hurting the one who caused it. She needed to convey to him, to Jason, the depth of her agony. And so she murdered the one for whom he left her, and the two sons that she had with him, the children she loved as life itself. She desperately wanted him to know, to feel, how deeply he had hurt her, how overwhelmed she was with grief.
To convey this story, this powerful feeling, Mary Zimmerman combined the story of Argonautica, written in the third century BC, with the play, Medea, written by Euripides in 431 BC. Only by first informing the audience of the story of Jason could she adequately convey to the audience the overwhelming depth of the pain of Medea. Only by relating the story of how Jason had relied on Medea to save him from certain death, of how she had even killed her own brother to save Jason's life, of how Jason had promised his undying love for her, could we fully understand her feelings of grief when he left her, casting her aside for another. Without the one story, the other would be insufficient, shallow, not understood. But in the combining of these stories, the deep agony of Medea was conveyed with full meaning, full force, full understanding.
This story is powerful, and it is easy to understand how it could have survived more than two thousand years, and yet be as meaningful today as then. The combining of these two powerful stories leaves one with feelings that go deep and stay fully realized in one's emotions long after the play is over. This play was great.
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