I won't play Medea

The play is about to begin. In the wings, an actress refuses to go onstage: she doesn't want to play Medea, the character immortalized by Greek poet Euripides. Feeling over everything and out of place, she reflects about living in theater and her conflicting relationship with her job, undoing the pact with the stage and breaking the expectations of everyone around her.

With poetic, hypnotic, and finely built writing, Eu não vou fazer Medeia, written by Magne van den Berg, who has won the Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs, an important Dutch drama award, is a work about the courage of questioning everything we once believed. Translated by Jonathan Andrade, it’s one of the five titles published by the Dramaturgia Holandesa collections, which presents foundational Dutch contemporary theater texts translated by important names of Brazilian theater.

About the author
Magne van den Berg was born in Enschede, in the Netherlands, in 1967. She’s a playwright with a degree from Mime School, University of the Arts de Amsterdam. Until 1999, she wrote and acted in her own performances, but, since 2006, began focusing entirely on playwriting. In 2008, she won the H.G. Van der Vies theater award for De lange nasleep van een korte mededeling, which was translated into German, English, and French, and staged in Germany, Scotland, and France. In 2016, she won the prestigious Dutch theater award Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs for Ik speel geen Medea. Magne van den Berg also creates performance pieces in collaboration with theater director Nicole Beutler and has written children’s theater plays directed by Timothy de Gilde.

About the translator
(Jonathan Andrade) [https://www.cobogo.com.br/jonathan-andrade-en] was born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1982. He’s a poet, actor, director, playwright, stage designer and costume designer, with a bachelor's degree in Performing Arts and a minor in Theater Acting from Brasília University (UnB). He’s a founding member of Grupo Sutil Ato, a theater collective that researches acting, authorial playwriting, and narrative poetics, in addition to promoting numerous activities such as seminars, workshops, and plays in Distrito Federal and throughout Brazil for 14 years. In his artistic trajectory, he has signed on to direct 26 plays, and won awards for playwriting, stage design, and performances. He worked as a professor at the Dulcina de Moraes college, where he was also the pedagogical director of the Performing Arts department, from 2009 to 2013. Since 2014, he’s been a member of Aisthesis, a multilanguage collective based on language cocreation and experimentation.

About the collection
The Dramaturgy collection has, since 2012, published writing by Brazilian and international playwrights. The books help in building a memory of current theater, making a new record in the contemporary theater scene. In 2015, Cobogó also launched Dramaturgia Espanhola, the Spanish collection, and, in 2019, Dramaturgia Francesa (2019), the French collection, as part of the Projeto de Internacionalização de Dramaturgias [Playwriting Internationalization Project], conceived by Márcia Dias, alongside the Núcleo dos Festivais Internacionais de Artes Cênicas do Brasil [Brazilian Performing Arts International Festival Center]. Now the Dutch collection, Dramaturgia Holandesa, arrives, with the support of Nederlands Letterenfonds – Dutch Foundation for Literature, and the Performing Arts Fund NL. There are over 100 titles published in the Dramaturgia collection, featuring various award-winning plays from over 70 important playwrights.

Specifications
Title Eu não vou fazer Medeia
[Ik speel geen Medea]
Collection Dutch Dramaturgy Collection
Author Magne van den Berg
Translator Jonathan Andrade
Language Portuguese
Page count 88
ISBN 978-65-5691-063-5
Format Softcover
Size 13 x 19 cm
Year 2022