“Not Medea” at off the WALL Productions

The Pittsburgh Tatler: The character of Medea from Greek mythology is often evoked as a shorthand for bad mothering. She was, after all, the woman who killed her children as part of her revenge against Jason, the husband who betrayed her and left her for another woman.

But Medea’s story, like motherhood itself, is complicated: from Medea’s point of view, Jason’s abandonment leaves her young sons with no future, so to kill them is to spare them a fate that she sees as worse than death. By her rather twisted logic, the murder of her children is an act of maternal love.