MEDEA/BRITNEY Returns For Premiere At HERE

What Will the Neighbors Say? is thrilled to present the official premiere production of Medea/Britney, written and directed by Co-Artistic Director James Clements for the Cloudbusters collective. The premiere will take place at the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE Arts Centre as part of the Co-op@HERE program, running December 6th and 7th at 8.30pm and December 8th at 4pm. Tickets are available at https://here.org/shows/medea-britney/.

Joining Clements on the production is performer and co-conciever Sophia Frank, production, set, costume and video designer Pablo Caldéron-Santiago and lighting designer Jack Scaletta, who are co-producing the project through their artist collective, the Cloudbusters, with WWTNS? presenting.

MEDEA/BRITNEY is a one-woman multimedia performance piece juxtaposing the Greek character of Medea with the modern tragedy and public consumption of contemporary pop icon Britney Spears. By contrasting the character of Medea with the public tragedy of Britney Spears, Medea/Britney uses multimedia elements to explore themes of proper femininity, the performative properties of public female bodies and the mythology of motherhood. The one-person show re-locates Medea's story to Spears' bathroom in 2008 when, at the height of her highly-publicised breakdown, she locked herself in the bathroom with her children. Subsequently, she was hospitalized and an on-going conservatorship was granted to her father. The show juxtaposes Medea's decision to carry out the murder with Spears' choice to return the children, considering the women's respective punishments.

MEDEA/BRITNEY was devised as part of a class taught by Kate Whoriskey at NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing. After further development at NYU, the project received a workshop production at the Living Gallery, curated as part of Thirsty Theatre Nights, in 2015. This October, a re-imagined workshop was presented as part of FringeCLUB, an initiative of the NYC Fringe, at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where the production was praised by Theatre is Easy as "combining Classical and modern female archetypes...[so the] tortured heroine reminds us of the enduring struggles of outspoken women in a patriarchal world."