The Trope of Transformation in Medea: A Noh Cycle‪.‬

Since the rise of feminism in the United States in the 1960s, cultural and materialist feminist theater playwrights have actively searched for new literary and theatrical forms that transcend the patriarchal strictures of realism. (1) As Jill Dolan suggested more than a decade ago in The Feminist Critic as Spectator, realism is ultimately a limited form for advancing political and social change. (2) In its presentation of "a slice of life" realism often perpetuates degrading and static female stereotypes. Even a "female mimesis" championed by cultural feminists, in which "productions can mirror female content through female forms" Dolan argues, often reinscribes the binary between gender and sex. (3) Moreover, even though cultural feminist theater practitioners have often embraced nonrealist forms, such as lecriture feminine, they ultimately value biology as the overriding criterion for unifying all women. As a result, cultural feminist theater reifies women's primary roles in society as mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, and caregivers. Materialist feminism, on the other hand, looks at "women as a class oppressed by material conditions and social relations." (4) Rather than linking sex and gender together, a materialist approach denaturalizes gender in order to show how society has constructed specific social roles for both men and women. Traditional Japanese theater forms--gigaku, no, kyogen, bunraku, and kabuki--have long prioritized stylization over realism in performance. (5) Paradoxically, their long history of all-male authorship and all-male performers has contributed to the notion that these theater forms are inherently sexist. Yet, since the 1960s, theater practitioners have drawn on these traditional forms to rediscover feminine and feminist messages. (6) In this essay, I discuss one of these experiments: Carol Sorgenfrei's 1975 work Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth. (7) By rejecting mimetic realism and drawing on the highly stylized no Sorgenfrei has crafted a play that is politically engaged in order to expose the constructed nature of everyday lived experience and to present a number of viewpoints. (8) By adhering to the structure of n6, Sorgenfrei creates a world where time, place, and gender are transcended in favor of larger-than-life emotions and issues.