The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women

Abstract

PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST Rhodessa Jones began conducting drama workshops with incarcerated women in the late 1980s. Inspired by the success of her one-woman show based on the lives of four inmates in her class, Big Butt Girls-Hard Headed Women, Jones decided to cre ate an ensemble with the inmates at San Francisco County jail. She used as a model Jean Trounstine's theater workshop inside Framingham, Massa chusetts, Prison for Women.' Never one to think small, Jones envisioned a troupe that would not only write and stage original works, but one that would perform in professional theaters for public audiences. She enlisted the help of Sean Reynolds, a social worker and health educator at the jail, and together they assembled a talented collective of artists and activists to work with the inmates, but it took three years to persuade the Sheriff's Department to allow incarcerated women to participate in a public per formance. In 1992, the group staged its first production, Reality IsJust Outside the Window: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson, to a standing-room-only crowd at the Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. The performance was loosely based on Euripides's Medea, and Jones dubbed their experiment the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.2 The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman