Like a Prayer, or el fin de la semana de teatro chicana/o

I just returned from my pilgrimage to the north to see Cherríe Moraga's The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea at Stanford. While I was quite familiar with the text of the play already (I lectured on it earlier this quarter) and the production didn't do anything radical to clarify, change or interpret that text, I am still quite grateful for the opportunity to have seen this production. It felt like a ritual that I was fortunate to have been allowed to witness.

My trip to the north was very much a pilgrimage, a trip specifically to see this particular play, a play that I feel is important to me as a queer theater scholar. Moraga's works don't seem to receive many productions and I'm not sure this one has ever been fully and professionally mounted. The production at Stanford was semi-professional; it had two Equity actors and a great deal of outside funding, but also several student performers and support from the Stanford Drama Dept.

Moraga's work is political and a bit didactic. This play is very specifically intended for a Chicana lesbian audience, which she makes very clear to those of us who aren't that ideal audience. The use of Spanish is less aesthetically pleasing than Alfaro's in Electricdad, though possibly more naturalistic. It seems intended to shut people out and remind them that they can't understand everything going on in the play, and maybe they aren't supposed to.

The thing that amazed me about seeing this production was how ambivalent I felt toward Medea, the main character. In reading the play, I had always assumed sympathy with Medea. She is clearly the center of the play, and seems to be the character with whom I most closely identify Moraga in terms of lesbian motherhood, heterosexual history, and Chicana feminist radicalism. The play is certainly her tragedy, centered around her as mother goddess and political prisioner. But VIVIS, who played Medea, played her as drunk and desperate and in general not as sympathetic as I had always assumed she would be. I definitely admired this decision, though it made me feel a little lost in the play without a central figure with whom to identify. I felt very conflicted about Medea as drunk and mad, as if it might be playing into negative stereotypes rather than rewriting them. I'm not sure.

By far my favorite performance in the play was Adelina Anthony as Luna. Anthony co-directed the production with Moraga, and she did a stunning job as both director and performer. Of course I must acknowledge my tendency to appreciate anyone playing a nuanced butch role, but Anthony did so particlarly well. She had her shoulder-length hair in braids and at times wasn't even wearing particularly butch clothing, and yet she managed to pull off a tough, sensitive, sympathetic portrayal of Luna the lesbian stonemason who is losing the woman she has loved for the past seven years. Because the play is centered around Medea, it's hard to characterize Luna consistently. She has lived with Medea and raised Medea's son for seven years, since they were first caught together and became exiles, but she also realizes that Medea is drifting away from her and she wants something more. For Luna, her lesbianism is unconflicted; it's not something she could deny or give up. Actually, she's more a symbol of butch lesbian than a fully fleshed-out character in a lot of ways. Her relationship to Medea and her symbolic importance are more central to the play than a consistent character development. She is faithful and loving to Medea despite Medea's madness and the temptation of a flirtateous friend. Anthony handled all this with beautiful understanding and maturity; despite the fact that she was notably younger and has less experience as a professional actress than VIVIS, she matched her and even outshone her in her love for the play and the role.

What I love about The Hungry Woman is its concept; it's set in "the not-too-distant future of a reimagined past," in what was the US after the revolution. Its subjuntive setting posits what if racially-motivated revolutions such as those posited in the Chicano and Black Power movements in the '60s had succeeded. This production rewrites that history into the 1980s, stating that if the Soviet Union could fall, why not the US? The US breaks into several smaller countries, Gringolandia covering the Northeast, the South becoming Afro-America, the Southwest joining with Mexico to form Aztlán and Native Americans and First Nations peoples also possessing their own homeland. In this imagined history, after the revolution the newly-formed states, particularly Aztlán, returned to gender politics as usual and sent the women back to the kitchens. Medea, who had been a leader of the revolution, was forced into a role as mother an housewife until she falls for a woman and gets caught. The play takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, a border town and ghetto where queers of all colors are exiled from the homelands that deny them. I love this almost sci-fi realism of the imagined future; the world that Moraga creates here is compelling, and could be the birthplace of so many fascinating stories.

The Hungry Woman centers around Medea and her son, Chac-Mool. Jasón, Medea's estranged husband, wants to take Chac-Mool back to Aztlán now that he's coming of age. Medea's relationship to Chac-Mool is oddly sexualized and obsessive; she doesn't want to relinquish him to his father, despite Jasón's legal rights. So instead she kills her son (or was it a dream? or was she insane?). The question seems to be how can we raise our children? Is there a model out there for a different kind of man or can we create one? Will boys always grow up to be men and take on patriarchal power in which their mothers and all women can be dominated and rejected? It raises interesting issues around lesbian motherhood as well as around the intersections of race and gender.

I could, and probably should, keep writing more about this production. I think it's important that this is documented, and it should probably be considered definitive considering the playwright's involvement in the production. It's a very strong production of a fascinating if problematic play and I could keep thinking and writing about it forever. But it's time for bed now.