Medea: Re-Versed, a Classic Play Rehashed

A review of Luis Quintero's electrifying battle-rap rendition of the Euripidean tragedy.

I might kill my ex, not the best idea
His new girlfriend’s next, how’d I get here?

I am a long time connoisseur and sometimes practitioner of female rage. SZA’s Kill Bill was my most played song of 2023, but long before that I had Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know on repeat. There’s something so satisfying about an openly scorned woman in a society that encourages women to keep a stiff upper lip about the wrongdoings of men. Two years after Morissette growled into the mic, “And every time I scratch my nails/ Down someone else's back, I hope you feel it,” there was Hilary Clinton, publicly supportive of (though privately fuming over) Bill and his sex scandal.

I devoured Euripides’ Medea when I first encountered it as an undergraduate at Saint Peter’s University. The callous and selfish betrayal of Jason, the barely bridled rage of Medea and the ending–as taboo in the 5th Century BCE as it is in the 21st–felt fresh, modern and, strangely enough, personal. The prose jumps off the page in my marked up translation by Diane Arnson Svarlien. It reads like an argument between your parents in the car. It reads like a battle.

Enter Luis Quintero’s Medea: Re-Versed, a “high-octane” battle rap version of the classic play, which first premiered at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival before running in New York at the Sheen Center from September 12th to October 20th. Accompanied by two guitarists and a beatboxer in the form of a chorus, the actors/emcees do double and sometimes triple duty as characters, the stage is stripped down, and the costuming reminiscent of Run DMC (with a few key details that point to its setting in Greece).

What it lacks in ornamentation though, it absolutely makes up for in heart. The intentionality of the costuming, blocking, acting and lyrics are enough for me to sing Medea: Re-Versed’s praises. Quintero’s version is not only inclusive, but its accessibility allows the meat of the play to stand on its own. What changes have been made help translate the tragedy for a modern audience. While some may bristle at the ubiquity of rap musicals, or at rap in general, those who are hesitant would do well to take a chance. As a lover of the original Euripides, of rap, and of female rage, merely singing its praises is not enough; I want to start shouting them from the rooftops.

In this version, each of the central conflicts in the play is turned into a battle rap faceoff. Audience participation is highly encouraged, and particularly emotionally cold bars do elicit an oooh from the crowd. To be clear, almost every single line in this play is rapped. This is “classics for the pit” according to Quintero. The “pit” is not too far from the amphitheater it seems, as the battle rap framing of the play directly mirrors the concept of agon, or conflict, between protagonists and antagonists in Greek tragedies.

The audience is not removed from the conflict either. The chorus leader takes an accusatory tone towards us from the jump with lines like “y’all the kind of people who paid to see a tragedy” and “what does it cost for us to see a tragedy” in the opening number. It reminds us that we are passive consumers, but consumers nonetheless, witnessing the worst day of this woman’s life, not unlike the Greeks that sat in a similar position nearly 2,500 years ago. Can we pretend to have the moral high ground over the ancients when we still consume the messy lives and deaths of women like Amy Winehouse?

Medea, played by the brilliant Sarin Monae West, does not let us off the hook as the play sweeps into its second number, Kids Don’t Listen. “You can’t feel my can’t feel my pain,” she says to the chorus, but the message is also for the audience: “You’re just here for the refrain.” My coworkers, a few friends of the Institute and I were greeted and guided to our seats at the start of the play by Quintero, serving, in his own words, as a church usher. “The theater is like a church,” he explained after the show, drawing parallels to the original Madea plays which were in their inception morality tales. Tyler Perry’s first Madea film was The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, a tale about a mistreated woman getting revenge on her cheating husband.

In Blood and Sand, Medea takes us through her journey from Colchis to Corinth. Particularly evocative is the imagery of Medea giving birth on the sand, with West contorting their face and body in a way that makes you want to call for a nurse. I can’t say enough about West’s acting choices: every snarl, every strut, every line delivery drips with venom. They also manage to get across the million emotions a minute someone in this circumstance might flip between. In one moment twitching with anger and in the next depressed and sullen.

As in the original text, she also runs through all of the horrible acts that she has taken on Jason’s behalf. “For my part, I betrayed my home, my father…and I killed Pelias, in the cruelest possible way: at his own children’s hands,” Medea lists in Arnson’s translation, on top of saving Jason’s life by killing the dragon. Indeed, though Medea takes on a traditionally masculine heroic role, long known to Classics scholars, her plight isn’t foreign to most women. What woman hasn’t supported a man by washing his socks, remembering his friend’s birthdays, transcribing his dictations or working through his emotional hang ups? Even “betraying” one’s home and moving away from friends and family for a male partner isn’t uncommon, as this recently viral TikTok describes (sadly sans cannibalism).

Quintero’s version has some significant departures from the original. The chorus is now mixed gender, but originally consisted of the women of Corinth. In the original these women both juxtapose and complement Medea. Much like women today who marathon Investigation Discovery shows like Deadly Women or Scorned: Love Kills and feel affinity with the murderesses, the Corinthian women understand Medea’s impulses in regards to Jason: “You’re justified, Medea, in paying your husband back.” However, they beg her at every chance to avoid killing her children, and are horrified when she finally goes through with it. They also serve to highlight Medea’s status as a foreigner.

Medea: Re-Versed also invokes Medea’s foreignness in several clever ways. The play employs colorblind casting and Medea is played in this staging by a person of color, unlike the two chorus members. Something I find more interesting is the styling. While the rest of the cast’s clothing is reminiscent of the b-boy 80s, Medea’s is decidedly more 2010s, with the skinny jeans and paint splatters looking straight out of the “Whip My Hair” music video. Speaking of hair, Monae West sports a hairstyle I would probably refer to as a Cassie (after songstress Cassie Ventura) that reached peak popularity around 2010: a haircut that is very long on top and cropped on one or many sides. Though popular, it was a bold choice even at its time. Medea’s styling instantly sets her apart from the rest of the characters and allows the musical to go beyond the lyrics.

Another element changed in this version is the ending. At the conclusion of both plays, Medea makes good on her threats and murders her children off screen. In the original, she appears before Jason with her dead children in her father Helios’s flying chariot called a mechane, a literal deus ex machina. Quintero does away with the mechane, in the hope that this play can be staged by production houses big and small. I find this noble, although I do miss the dramatic entrance/exit by Medea, if just for its pizazz. The literal Deus ex Machina is replaced by a haunting number called Deus ex Machina. Instead of flying in on a chariot, Medea emerges from backstage doused in deep red light, blood smeared on her white outfit. According to the stage notes, Medea has set the house and herself on fire.

Contrary to her triumphant ascent in the original, this final evil act has apparently caused her permanent descent to Hades. The song opens with the chorus ominously chanting Medea’s name, eventually giving way to Jason’s screaming and Medea’s disassociated laughter. At the end we are left with silence–the intense strobe lighting and lack of vocals left me shifting in my seat. I find this update preferable for a 21st century audience that cut its teeth on gritty endings, though the new version leaves it unclear if she finds safe haven at Athens with Aegeus. By getting her messy revenge on Jason, she has damned herself. I myself am torn; I am not too afraid to say publicly that I want an evil woman to get away with it, just once.

After the show, we are invited to the lobby to spend time with the playwright and actors. On a whiteboard, the previous audience has left some questions: “What does revenge mean to you? Is it ever justified?” “Who do you think holds more power in a relationship: the one who loves more or the one who loves less?” To answer the first question, I believe that revenge is often justified. But unfortunately, and I argue this from experience, the pursuit of revenge will ultimately do more damage to you than to your target. I believe that is the lesson at the heart of Medea: Re-Versed.

I get the cast of Medea: Re-Versed to sign my old copy of Medea, right on the Cast of Characters page. Thumbing through the book, I land on a quote by the Chorus: “Poor thing, we pity you for this disaster, daughter of Creon, you who have descended to Hades’ halls because of your marriage to Jason.” After a rousing discussion with the cast and some post-show debriefing with my coworkers at a local spot, I decided to make my way home. The end of Kill Bill rings in my headphones:

I still love him though,
Rather be in Hell than alone