PECONG
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It was a sordid enough tale when Euripides told it in 431 BC. It was a long and complicated one as well. Euripides, recognizing the difficulties of containing all this intrigue within the time-and-place conventions of the tragedy form, chose to narrate only the events surrounding Jason’s desertion and Medea’s revenge, emphasizing the romantic aspects of the story. But in making Medea’s only motivation her love for Jason, he eliminated much of the story’s power and impact. Because the protagonists of classic tragedy must of necessity be people of great consequence–tragedy does not concern itself with small disturbances. If the actions of heroic figures are based simply on selfish motives, these characters are stripped of their larger responsibilities to the gods and to society. And their actions–however much they may amuse the curious and prurient–are no longer significant.
This is precisely the problem with Pecong. Carter has chosen to include more of the Medea myth, but to further reduce the universe in which it occurs. Instead of performing arduous and exotic tasks such as harnessing fire-breathing bulls and battling armies sprung from dragons’ teeth in order to acquire his prize, this Jason Allcock has only to win at Pecong–a sort of rap version of “the dozens,” in which two opponents vilify each other in nonstop rhyme until one of them becomes tongue-tied. The sight of Jason, crowned with a ram’s-horn headdress, strumming an instrument resembling a child’s toy guitar and taunting his opponent with crude jokes about the condition of his mother’s reproductive organs, forces us to wonder why on earth Mediyah, sorceress of the highest order and a queen in her own right, even bothers with him. Bother with him she does, however, crawling at his feet and begging him to stay with her, like a streetwalker pleading with her pimp. It’s nice melodrama, but impossible to take seriously–though this is going to end in death, and death is no trivial matter. By diminishing his characters, Carter also diminishes their actions, making what should be a grand cataclysm little more than a lurid tale fit only for the National Enquirer of a jealous mass murderess and the man who done her wrong.
Susan Katz’s Courage Untold is almost the polar opposite of Pecong. Rather than promising much and delivering little, this docudrama of the 1944 prisoners’ uprising at Auschwitz didn’t promise to be anything more than another holocaust play (possibly with a feminist angle), but wound up delivering more than perhaps even the playwright was aware.
