By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Lucy loves monsters — those from mythology and the daily news.
That’s what’s brought her to Pittsburgh, she tells her podcast listeners whom she calls her fellow monsters. She’s in a motel room where the dismembered bodies of four sex workers were found. Still, she seems distracted, wandering off topic. She previews a coming episode about the mythological figure Medea, lover of Jason, who when he left her for a princess, murdered their two sons as well as his new wife. Killing, as it were, his future.
But Lucy has more on her mind than what’s coming out of her mouth. She’s really in Pittsburgh to get an abortion. She’s traveled from her West Virginia home because the medical procedure is banned there in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
The Black Swamp Players are staging Aly Kantor’s “Murdering Medea,” Friday, June 20, and Saturday, June 21, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, June 22 at 1:30 p.m. continuing Friday, June 27, and Saturday, June 28, at 7:30 p.m. with a Sunday, June 29 at 1:30 p.m. Click here for tickets.
The play’s run coincides with the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision which was handed down on June 24, 2022. The ruling overturned Roe v. Wade and gave states the power to regulate abortion.
“Murdering Medea,” the winner of the Players’ 2023-2024 Telling Stories Playwriting Competition, charges into this emotionally and politically fraught territory. It comes with cautions that it deals with abortion, murder, gun violence, family estrangement due to political beliefs, sex, and domestic violence. And the play works hard to earn those cautions.
Lucy (Louis Warner) is not a minor, a rape victim, entrapped in an abusive relationship, or inflicted with a life threatening medical condition. No, she’s a young woman who enjoys having sex with men.“My body, my choice” is her mantra. Giving birth at this point in her life will hijack her future.
Lucy wonders about why so much more is known about the man who murdered the four women in that motel room, than of the women themselves, except one was a mother. They were murdered at work, she says. She’s at work. A single woman in a strange motel. She’s on edge.
But such musings clash with her immediate problem. Lucy is almost manic as she calls the clinic. Grateful when they set an appointment for the next day. Confused when they hang up, She catalogs other options like a drug-induced abortion or sipping Drano through a straw, which she starts to order from room service.
In the midst of this, Medea (Jackie Cummings) appears. She’s is apparently immortal. Greek mythology provides no punishment for her crime. She instead is given a golden chariot “with cupholders,” she tells Lucy.
The apparition startles Lucy, but in time she becomes the girlie friend Lucy lacks in life. Then Medea becomes a blunt counselor — so much more effective than the string of online counselors Lucy has used.
Finally she is Lucy’s raging inner voice, expressing anger at the sexist society that puts the burden of reproduction on the woman.
In the midst of this her boyfriend AJ (Trevor Walsh) shows up.
We know that AJ and Lucy have had a conversation about their future. Like their relationship, it was one-way, with AJ going on about his dreams of having a family and a tidy home in the suburbs. Lucy has not told him about her pregnancy, and certainly not about her plans to end it.
All this heaviness, though, is laced with humor. Lucy’s insights into her upbringing are acute. She recalls Fireman Joe who gives talks at her school about girls who become pregnant and give birth in the school bathroom and leave the newborns in the toilet. It’s over the top shaming from a seemingly innocuous source. “He’s like if a puppy were a man.”
Cummins’ Medusa is an unvarnished comedian, coloring the raw material with humor. Her monologue about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood makes your hair stand on end in its candor and smile unwittingly at its outrageous details.
Walsh’s AJ is annoyingly clueless and self-absorbed. He’s so much more certain about her life than she is. He seems almost as much an alien presence in Lucy’s life as Medusa.
In the end, Lucy is as we found her — alone with her microphone, and invisible fellow monsters, and the question of her future before her. But she, as is the audience, all the wiser for the experience of meeting Medea.
