Learning to Love Medea: The Hungry Woman, Mojada, and the Pedagogy of Adaptation

abstract:This essay proposes adaptation as a teaching strategy with which students can explore deeper understandings of any drama, using the case study of Medea by Euripides. By assigning comparative analysis of (translations of) Euripides' play alongside two twenty-first century adaptations written by Chicanx playwrights Luis Alfaro (Mojada) and Cherríe Moraga (The Hungry Woman), I invite students to uncover dramaturgical discoveries through considerations of what I have called "the spirit of the source," alongside analyses of the palimpsestuousness of the dramas and my spectator-based model of adapturgy. I argue that Medea's traits and actions of unbecoming emerge as a thread connecting all versions of the eponymous plays, a theme rarely recognized by students without the revelations provided by adaptation pedagogy.