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Finding Medea in a Dream of Passion

2022; Boston University; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2022.0026

2327-6436

Mark Lundy,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Finding Medea in a Dream of Passion Mark Lundy (bio) Medea is a princess of Colchis who helps Jason win the Golden Fleece, commits several murders on his behalf, and then follows him to Corinth, where he intends to betray her by marrying the local princess, daughter of King Creon. That is where Euripides' Medea begins, as it was performed in Athens in 431 B.C.E. At play's end, Medea flies away on a dragon-chariot, having murdered the king and princess of Corinth and then, climactically, her two young sons by Jason. The play challenges us to understand Medea's actions, especially her filicide, and to empathize with a woman in extremis. Jules Dassin's film A Dream of Passion (1978) takes the Medea story as its starting point, but then implicates us in a more complicated web of relationships, mediated through stage, screen, and Greek-English translation. The film follows an aging movie star, Maya (Melina Mercouri), who returns from Hollywood to her native Greece in order to star in a stage version of Medea. During the rehearsal process, she learns of an American woman, Brenda Collins (Ellen Burstyn), who murdered her three children to get revenge on a cheating husband and was sensationalized in the press as the "Medea of Glyfada," after the resort town where they lived. Maya goes to visit Brenda in prison—first as a crass publicity stunt for the play, "The Two Medeas." But she quickly becomes fixated on Brenda. She must understand this woman in order to understand Medea, and to understand herself. Above all, A Dream of Passion is about how an actress finds her way into a role, and how empathy for another, which is the lifeblood of the theater, starts its work on her as an actress and as a human being long before opening night. Politics, or "a politics," is distinct from empathy for any particular person. In order to be a mass movement, a political program must [End Page 43] think not of people but of types, not of this or that family but of the "family unit" or the "household," and so the early feminism called women's liberation speaks not to a woman or to several women, but to women as a class. Out in society, such mass thinking is necessary. In art, it is fatal.1 Maya's initial reading of the character is ideological and therefore simplistic. Medea finds common cause with the Corinthian women by necessity since she is a foreigner in this land, under the suspicion of Creon and his court and newly estranged from Jason. Turning that initial speech into a manifesto subtracts Medea from the Medea. She is a canny manipulator, not a revolutionary. Kostas (Andréas Voutsinas), the theater director within the film, is right to deride Maya's feminist interpretation: the Medea is "poetry, not current events" (17:55).2 Maya may have come to this interpretation first because she was new to the play. As in literary criticism, the political reading is the easiest. It avoids complexities to arrive at a prefabricated conclusion. No matter how just the politics may be, the political interpretation requires the least empathy, since it is a relationship between actress and ideology, not actress and role, as great theater demands. Maya does believe in women's liberation, but she has not yet found that one woman whose soul she must understand to play her part well. Toward the end of the film, she acknowledges what links her to Brenda and Medea, a private regret at odds with her politics. As we learn in a filmed interview at the cast party, Maya has considered herself a murderess since age 18, when she induced a miscarriage for the sake of her newborn acting career (1:24:00). She feels she has committed murder. This feeling already distances her from the abstractions of political ideology, including the women's liberation in which she just as sincerely believes, with its emphasis on reproductive rights. Unwanted children have probably been killed since prehistory. In the ancient world, child exposure was the usual method.3 But Maya's particularly brutal way of ending a...