It started as a prayer: “Hail Medusa, full of snakes.”
I was working on a writing project adapting various Greek myths, trying to find in these stories the truths for people who live now. Demeter and Persephone, Pandora, Procne, Medea, Arachne. Modern language, modern clothing, modern scenarios, ancient problems, ancient solutions, ancient truths. It was November 2019 and in this project, my Medusa was powerful, invincible. She was everything I needed and wanted her to be. In a witchy incantation stylized after the Hail Mary, I wrote, “Her snakes are there to keep her safe, keep us all safe. Her snakes are there now because they weren’t there before…Horrid Medusa, devour the sinners, now and at the hour of their death.” I had written her as a patron saint, as a vengeful mother to all who needed her protection, and yet I hadn’t written at all about her being a mother to her own children. That wasn’t part of the Medusa myth I knew.
In March 2020, my creativity shifted from writing to another type of survival. The statistics about mothers, work, and the pandemic are staggering. I had only recently found a balance between being Mother and all the other human things I wanted and needed to be. In the early pandemic, there was no balance to be had. I don’t know if I would have found my way to a mothering Medusa without this time where it was impossible for me to be anything else. Once I learned she was a mother, that was the story I needed to tell.
This story became a play in spring 2021. I continuously struggled through a direct address assignment in a playwriting course. The onstage character of first Gorgeous and then The Monster, and draft titles including “Pregnant Medusa,” “Like Talking to a Stone Wall,” and “Medusa, Mother of Gods,” all received similar feedback. What is she trying to figure out? She is too powerful.
And she is. Medusa has the power to turn anyone to stone with her gaze! So how does someone so powerful become known by the image of her defeat?—Perseus holding her head. How does someone so powerful never speak?—Perseus telling her story. These are not unanswered questions—the answer is unsatisfying. It should not be possible. It is what we have. I want better. I want Medusa the hero, the protector, the vengeful monster. Yet, I also came to see the heroics in what I had on paper—a mother, a person with the power to harm who instead remained isolated, a woman who deserved a turn to speak.
Dua was born out of a need to try to tell this story from scratch. To try to leave my many Medusas at the door and see and hear this one. To separate the human from the Monster. To find out how she would tell her story. What parts would be important? Who was important to her? How did she want to be in the world? How did she want to be seen and known? Who could she be in this story that she maybe didn’t get to be in others?
So many people have a personal relationship with this myth, with their Medusa. The one they know and love and need. It continues to be a privilege to learn from people what Medusa and her story means to each of them. I hope you will come meet Dua. Hear her story. She may not be your Medusa, but maybe she can live beside the one you already hold dear. And maybe you will find something true in this one. Her name was inspired by a neighbor. Dua is Arabic for an act of worship, a prayer.
Robin Berl is a writer of truths and fictions large and small whose work is filtered through her experiences as a parent and a mixed race woman of the CHamoru Diaspora. Robin is incredibly grateful that her monster has found a home with Theatre Prometheus and she could not imagine a better place to develop this play, tell this story, and breathe life into this project. Robin’s plays have received readings or productions with Asian Pasifika Arts Collective and Strand Theater Company, MD, Spooky Action Theater, Washington D.C; Winding Road Theater Ensemble, AZ; Little Fish Theatre, CA; Breaking Wave Theatre Company, Guam. She was a playwright for Breaking Wave Theatre Company’s Podcast Plays Legends of Guåhan series (“A New Old Way of Life: A Trongkon Lemmai Adaptation”). Robin graduated from University of Delaware with BAs in English Literature and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. Robin is a member of Dramatists Guild.
This staged reading was made possible with support from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of Social Impact’s Local Theatre Festival 2023