Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women

by Rena Fraden, Angela Davis (Foreword by)

Overview

This ain't no Dreamgirls," Rhodessa Jones warns participants in the Medea Project, the theater program for incarcerated women that she founded and directs. Her expectations are grounded in reality, tempered, for example, by the fact that women are the fastest growing population in U.S. prisons. Still, Jones believes that by engaging incarcerated women in the process of developing and staging dramatic works based on their own stories, she can push them toward tapping into their own creativity, confronting the problems that landed them in prison, and taking control of their lives.

Rena Fraden chronicles the collaborative process of transforming incarcerated women's stories into productions that incorporate Greek mythology, hip-hop music, dance, and autobiography. She captures a diverse array of voices, including those of Jones and other artists, the sheriff and prison guards, and, most vividly, the women themselves. Through compelling narrative and thoughtful commentary, Fraden investigates the Medea Project's blend of art and activism and considers its limits and possibilities for enacting social change.

Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Francisco-based performance company Cultural Odyssey and founder of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. An award-winning performer, she has taught at the Yale School of Drama and the New College of California.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469610979
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	12/30/2012
Series:	Gender and American Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Rena Fraden is professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is author of Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater, 1935-1939.

Read an Excerpt

Imagine a woman able to partake in a social political cultural conversation. . . . —Rhodessa Jones, program notes, Slouching Towards Armageddon

I begin with an image of a theatrical eruption that occurred in Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, the fifth full-length public performance of the Medea Project. The audience is seated, waiting for the performance to begin, the stage is dark, and all of a sudden, hip-hop music booms out, the doors in the back of the theater are flung open, the audience twists and turns around to look, and what they see coming down the aisles of the theater is a long line of stamping, kicking, dancing women moving through the theater and up onto the stage. The women's boisterous entrance—not from the wings, where we might expect actors to enter, but from outside the theater—heralds the key act of the Medea Project: to make visible what has been repressed and oppressed. That which has been sequestered, kept out of sight, bursts out among us, so loudly and with such exuberant, menacing, energy that it is impossible to ignore. The women interrupt the normal boundaries of the theater, and they even manage to interrupt our view of each other as they parade among us. They have been let out and are now in our midst, invading the space usually reserved for the audience. What are we to make of them? Who are they? What will they say? What do they stand for? Are these women supposed to be mythical furies, or are they simply furious? Are they the elemental allegorical figures we see listed in the program, or are they the people with names like Darcell and Chelsea also found there? How will this theatrical event explain the interruption before us, and make us not only understand what we are seeing but what our connection may be to what is in front of our eyes? What have they to do with us?

Rhodessa Jones consciously directs these women to be "in their face," to "take it to the audience." She wants them to interrupt the comfortable passivity of an audience sitting in their seats, awaiting their entertainment. She wants the music loud; she wants the women to look scary. And she insists on making a connection between us and them. In her preperformance speech to audiences, she argues that these women from jail have everything to do with us:

In the days of antiquity, theater included us all. It was a religious experience. I hope this project resounds back to that theater. This is not psychodrama. Word came out that one critic has said, "We've seen The Medea Project. Why see it again?" Well, the reason is, this is the voice of the people here, of women, and women are mad as hell. It's lawless out there. We ask the question why more and more women are going to jail; what's happening to our children. . . . This is theater for the twenty-first century. The evening news doesn't get it; it talks about African American men. But we want to take a global look, at all of it. If your life is so normal, give your seat to somebody else. Attempt to imagine the life of another; this is theater for American culture; it is rehabilitation, planting the seeds. If you think jail doesn't have anything to do with you, someday, just wait, a ten-year-old will be pointing an Uzi in your face. Just as we've seen AIDS touch us all, so will this violence.[1]

Her central claim is that theater is a religious experience, a place of communion, which includes everyone. Her use of Greek, African, and Asian myths and of folk stories is one way she insists on making her theater inclusive. Her theater also depends on bringing together people who normally wouldn't find themselves in one place at any one time thinking about what they have in common. She means her work to be a kind of education for the women who take part in the ensemble or chorus. Those women, like the young men in training in classical Athens, are meant to see how they can defend themselves and their children and their community from violence and to be able to distinguish between true friends and enemies within and without. Jones's theater, like the classical Greek, wants to make the audience the judge, reacting in horror to the violations of civilization and in sympathy with a critique of it.

When she convinced the San Francisco Sheriff's Department to release the women to perform in a legitimate theater space in the city, she changed more than just the location. The incarcerated are, for the evening, no longer hidden or silent. And for those few evenings, the work is no longer drama as therapy or arts as correction; it is no longer theater only for incarcerated women. It becomes theater about why some women end up incarcerated and some do not; it is about what should connect communities and what does not connect them at present. It calls into question the boundaries of what is public and free and what isn't, and it exposes the violence that connects us all. Short of promising personal salvation, Jones has said she means her art to build bridges, in order to make even the most protected and privileged of spectators feel their connections with those who are not. Part of the drama is to make the audience ask questions: why these women, why are more women going to jail, and how does the incarceration of women affect society at large? Finally, Jones wants her theater to be a call to community, to thinking about what a proper community should look like and what sorts of social action would have to take place to bring that community into being.

It makes sense to begin with a PUBCOMMENTS of the most visible part of the Medea Project, the public theatrical production, because the conversation can begin only when we can hear what hasn't been heard, see what hasn't been seen. But everyone who sees a live Medea production feels the tension between what they can see and what remains invisible. We know there are other women we will not hear from, because we are told at the end of the performance who they are. We also know there are numerous organizations that played a part in controlling the movement of these women back and forth and in and out, but they are not on stage. In the last Medea Production of the twentieth century, Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, the theater workshops that led up to the public performance existed in and around many institutions: hospitals, jails, halfway houses. Jones coordinated an impressive list of organizations of political and social power that promised to help the incarcerated women after the public performance is over.[2] But we know watching the evening's performance that we can't know who will and who won't profit.

Walking to the theater in which Slouching Towards Armageddon was performed, up Powell Street in downtown San Francisco, I wind my way through panhandlers, street people, drug addicts. I mostly don't look at them; I even hope they stay mostly invisible. And the irony grows, because I know I'm going to see performances by the very types I am now trying to avoid seeing. Slouching opened on 21 January 1999 at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a theater that produces African American plays and is located inside the gymnasium of the old YWCA, now the Sheehan Hotel. Seating 300 people, the theater was sold out every night of the two weekend runs.

The audience was racially diverse; there were African Americans, Asians, Chicanos, whites. A San Franciscan mixture of progressives and bohemians, old hippies and the young hip, gay and straight filled the theater. Various representatives from the jails came to the performances; the sheriff was there on the first Saturday night. Angela Davis came one evening. There were funders from local foundations; social workers and residents from the halfway houses some of the women live in; students, families, and friends of the women in the troupe; people from the theater community in San Francisco; and the simply curious. Since 1992, when the Medea Project first went public, Jones has worked to expand the network of people who make the evening possible. The shows have been advertised, reviewed, and celebrated in local papers as great entertainment and as a socially worthy cause, so that now, when an audience gathers, it feels like a reunion. Many in the audience are known to each other; they are colleagues in the work place, or neighbors, friends, or friends of friends. They are ready to be entertained, but they also participate—cheering, stomping, hissing, and rising to their feet to applaud at the end of each evening.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	ix
	Preface	xiii
	Introduction	1
1	A Counter Epic: Making the Medea Project	27
2	To Be Real: Rehearsing Techniques	67
3	Prison Discourse: Surveying Lives	120
4	Community Work: Imagining Other Spaces	179
Appendix	Selected Performing and Directing Biography of Rhodessa Jones	207
	Notes	209
	Bibliography	231
	Index	241

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Provid[es] a valuable insight into a neglected aspect of US theater history.—Choice



Rena Fraden has written a fascinating and complex book. Through biography, interview, scripts and comparative analysis of educational, dramatic and political theory, she makes the Medea Project come alive for the reader. . . . The book forces us to rethink and reevaluate the kind of society we want, to look at how to restore dignity and justice inside a twisted and vengeful system.—Women's Review of Books



While Fraden's book explores what it means to teach theatre in a prison environment, it goes further by raising important questions about the larger relationship between women and theatre as an institution.—American Theatre



Both this book and the theater project it explores make an important contribution to contemporary activist efforts to rescue imprisoned women of color from the invisibility to which they historically have been relegated.—Angela Y. Davis, from the Foreword



Rhodessa Jones and the incarcerated women with whom she works have created compelling art out of terror and despair. And Rena Fraden has captured the spirit of this visionary effort in an engaging, thoughtful, and inspiring text. Don't miss the joy of reading it.—Margaret B. Wilkerson, Ford Foundation

Editorial Reviews

Both this book and the theater project it explores make an important contribution to contemporary activist efforts to rescue imprisoned women of color from the invisibility to which they historically have been relegated.

Angela Y. Davis

Rhodessa Jones and the incarcerated women with whom she works have created compelling art out of terror and despair. And Rena Fraden has captured the spirit of this visionary effort in an engaging, thoughtful, and inspiring text. Don't miss the joy of reading it.

Margaret B. Wilkerson

While Fraden's book explores what it means to teach theatre in a prison environment, it goes further by raising important questions about the larger relationship between women and theatre as an institution.

American Theatre

Rena Fraden has written a fascinating and complex book. Through biography, interview, scripts and comparative analysis of educational, dramatic and political theory, she makes the Medea Project come alive for the reader.

Women's Review of Books

Both this book and the theater project it explores make an important contribution to contemporary activist efforts to rescue imprisoned women of color from the invisibility to which they historically have been relegated. (Angela Y. Davis, from the Foreword)

Rhodessa Jones and the incarcerated women with whom she works have created compelling art out of terror and despair. And Rena Fraden has captured the spirit of this visionary effort in an engaging, thoughtful, and inspiring text. Don't miss the joy of reading it. (Margaret B. Wilkerson, Ford Foundation)

From the Publisher