Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (review)

Rena Fraden introduces Imagining Medea by saying she first conceived of the book as a "celebratory recording" (xiii) of the Medea Project, the San Francisco-based theatre program for incarcerated women led by the dynamic Rhodessa Jones. Fraden's impulse is appropriate: the Medea Project, a visionary cultural initiative combining artistic rigor and political activism, not only deserves celebration, it demands documentation. Fraden's loving study is based upon several interviews with Jones, her collaborators, and even the prison wardens whose cooperation helped make the project possible. A script excerpt of the Medea Project's adaptation of Medea gives palpable evidence of the vitality of Jones's work and its deep resonance with the women who perform in it. Like Medea, many of the performers are doubly marginalized by race and gender. Many have violated societal taboos and laws either for the sake of a man or to spite him. Some have even murdered. And now as they "do time," the women are separated from their children, or have lost custody forever. In their version of Medea, the title character announces herself by shouting from offstage: "Motherfucking bastard! You Clarence Thomas, David Duke, Wilt Chamberlain, William Kennedy Smith . . . looking ass nigger! Son of a bitch motherfucker, I hope your dick falls off!" (57). With rapid fire language that is percussive and cutting, the Medea Project's adaptation, entitled Reality Is Just Outside the Window, exemplifies what Rhodessa Jones calls the "magical terror" of womanhood (67).

One senses throughout Imagining Medea the transformative power of the Medea Project, with its compelling ability to give voice to women who have had few opportunities to be heard and even fewer opportunities to be creative. The productions mounted between 1992 and 1999 and documented here are full of poignant, autobiographical stories depicting conditions of poverty, physical abuse, and dreams deferred. Created in prison and presented to the public, the Medea Project performances use narrative, dance, and myth in a freewheeling structure orchestrated by Jones herself, who sits even during performances at a table downstage, facing the actors, encouraging them, and talking back. She yells, "Speak out!" or "Move it!," while snapping her fingers. Fraden devotes a whole chapter to Jones's rehearsal process, which includes techniques such as rants, the "kicking dance," hand dancing, and naming of first memories and matrilineages. Another chapter reproduces interview transcripts with a number of the key participants. Fraden also explores the "fortuitous alchemy" of artists, administrators, and funding that allowed the Medea Project through the door of the prisons, and kept it alive during the productions documented in this book, from Reality is Just Outside the Window in 1992 to Slouching Towards Armageddon in 1999. Of the latter production, Fraden provides a lengthy thick description in the opening chapter, attempting to capture in words the riveting, multisensory experience of being there, live, as one participant tells a story of being raped and stabbed, and another reads a letter to her missing father. Fraden's interviews with participants give ample evidence ofthe Medea Project's successes, particularly its ability to build self-esteem for people who have otherwise experienced in their lives a systematic psychological battering.

While Imagining Medea is an important testimony to an ongoing collaboration between women in the San Francisco County Jail system and women artists in the free world, one wishes the book were simultaneously less celebratory in tone and more rigorous in its documentation. Fraden introduces her research techniques with great modesty: "In creating this book, I interviewed some people, they told me something about themselves, I saw some performances and workshops" (xiv). The bibliography indicates Fraden conducted at least twenty-one interviews, so one senses there was a bit more purposefulness to her method than she indicates. Fraden draws upon interviews by reproducing them in full, arguing that the book allows the women to "speak for themselves" (25). What is unclear is the basis upon which these...