Villanova associate professor and renowned playwright Ijames, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Broadway play “Fat Ham”, had another of his works “Media/Medea” staged in a collaborative project with students from Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, and the Community College of Philadelphia, writes Judy Hill for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.
Media/Medea is a modern adaptation of Euripedes’ Greek tragedy Medea, envisioned from a Black perspective.
The play was performed locally in md-April at the Goodhart in Bryn Mawr and at the Black Box Theater at Community College of Philadelphia.
Half of the student actors and crew were from Haverford and Bryn Mawr and half were from CCP.
The performances were the culmination of Greek Drama/Black Lives, a yearlong collaboration between the three colleges.
“This project uses theater to draw a line from the classics to the present, challenging us along the way,” said Catharine Slusar, chair of the Arts for the Theater program at Bryn Mawr.
Along with the play, the project included a playwriting class for middle schoolers at E.M. Stanton School in South Philadelphia and a theoretical and experiential graduate seminar.
Read more about the Greek Drama/Black Lives project and the collaborative re-envisioning of a Greek tragedy in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.
