Medea/Medea

I have seen many plays and entertaining shows throughout my life, but I can honestly say this play was like nothing I have ever seen in my life before. I was not too sure what to expect. After reading the reviews for this play, I felt a little confused. I read them over and over again hoping that each time I read it I would maybe understand it better the next time. I realized that that was probably a sign that the play itself was going to be confusing. The first thing that was different from a more traditional play was there was not much talking. The only talking was a prerecorded voice on a TV screen which usually was not in English. The main character also spoke a few times in a language I did not recognize. Words make a play easier to follow and understand what is going on. Without words, it is up to the audience to make their own interpretation of what is happening. So without the character saying "I feel sad" it might be harder to know if the character is sad or not. The characters in this play had no expressions on their faces either. They were completely void of emotion the whole entire play. So when they made use of the props, it was very hard to understand why they were using them. In more traditional plays, the use of props is used to accentuate the emotion of the scene. The theater company used this to push our boundaries to see if the audience could dig deep enough down and understand what was really going on. Also, pyrotechnics are used a lot in entertainment type shows to wow the audience. In this show there were a lot of pyrotechnics, and it was used to shock the audience in some way, but not the way traditional pyrotechnics were used. For example, when the main character got out the blow torch, some people in the audience laughed a bit, but when she lit the birdcage on fire I actually heard some people gasp. Overall, I think this play used these techniques to really gauge the audience. They wanted to make you dig deep down into your psyche and try and understand the play in your own way.