Media/Medea, a new play supported by an ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grant, is featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The play is written by James Ijames, and is a collaboration between the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) and Bryn Mawr College. Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama for Fat Ham, currently on Broadway.
Media/Medea is part of the collaborative project “Greek Drama/Black Lives: Intergenerational Collaboration in Philadelphia,” which was awarded a 2022 ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grant. This grant program is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.
The play is a reimagining of the classical Greek tragedy from a Black perspective influenced by contemporary culture and informed by the highly publicized celebrity divorces that populate social media channels. The collaborators agreed to make Media/Medea open access, making it freely available for other colleges, high schools, or theater groups to reproduce it in the future.
This global premiere runs April 13-16, 2023 at Bryn Mawr College and April 20-22 at CCP. Read more in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In addition to building the foundation for ongoing scholarly and artistic collaboration between the two institutions, this co-production is one of the first new works by Ijames since receiving the Pulitzer Prize and features production design, direction, and support from a diverse team of professional theatre artists in Philadelphia.
Quinn Eli, Program Coordinator for Theater
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ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grants
ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grants, made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), support public humanities programs based at accredited United States colleges and universities that have experienced staffing reductions related to pandemic conditions, programming setbacks, and/or loss of institutional capacity for publicly engaged work. Awarded programs have demonstrated a deep commitment to the co-creation of knowledge with diverse communities outside of academia and promising approaches to addressing the most pressing issues our society faces today.
