The Medea Project

PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST Rhodessa Jones began conducting drama workshops with incarcerated women in the late 1980s. Inspired by the success of her one-woman show based on the lives of four inmates in her class, Big Butt Girls-Hard Headed Women, Jones decided to cre ate an ensemble with the inmates at San Francisco County jail. She used as a model Jean Trounstine's theater workshop inside Framingham, Massa chusetts, Prison for Women.' Never one to think small, Jones envisioned a troupe that would not only write and stage original works, but one that would perform in professional theaters for public audiences. She enlisted the help of Sean Reynolds, a social worker and health educator at the jail, and together they assembled a talented collective of artists and activists to work with the inmates, but it took three years to persuade the Sheriff's Department to allow incarcerated women to participate in a public per formance. In 1992, the group staged its first production, Reality IsJust Outside the Window: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson, to a standing-room-only crowd at the Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. The performance was loosely based on Euripides's Medea, and Jones dubbed their experiment the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.2 The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman

Art · Art history · Visual arts · Art Therapy and Mental Health · History · Theatre and Performance Studies

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• Baring and Bearing Life Behind Bars

  Jessica Berson•TDR/The Drama Review•2008

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