The Lincoln Center Theatre Review is a thrice-yearly publication of Lincoln Center Theater. The magazine's goal is to illuminate and provide context for the productions of each season. In the fall of 1999, the theater presented a musical based on Euripides' classic play of revenge and murder, The Medea: "Marie Christine" was set in 1890s New Orleans and Chicago. The title character, a beautiful mulatto from New Orleans, is wooed and wed by Dante, a white man. Together they have children and move to Chicago, where Dante abandons his family when their racial heritage threatens to derail his political aspirations. The editor of the Review invited Wilbert Rideau to review the lyrics-to-show for inclusion in the magazine. The following article is reprinted with permission from the author and from Lincoln Center Theater Review Fall 1999, Issue Number 23.

It's A Man's World by Wilbert Rideau 1999

We meet Marie Christine on the last night of her life, as she awaits execution.

She had done the unthinkable. News reports would have characterized her as a woman scorned who took revenge in the murder of her two boys - an unnatural, incomprehensible deed. It's tempting to shudder, turn away, and dismiss her as one sick woman. But her crime is as intriguing as it is horrid. How could a mother murder the children she carried in her womb, suckled at her breast, and reared?

Betrayed and abandoned by Dante, Marie Christine exacts revenge by murdering his bride on their wedding day. She then kills her own sons - I believe - not to vanquish Dante, their father, but to protect them from a life of humiliation and misery. Fearing that Dante will corrupt her children, she vows, "I'll never let you have my babies. . . . Better they had never been born - !" Her fears are heightened when Dante's racist father-in-law indicates that her sons will be no more than servants in his household and then threatens, "You can't imagine what I'm capable of doing. To you. To your little boys." From Marie Christine's perspective, the children are better off dead. The last words she speaks in the story are to her sons: "You are too beautiful for this world." Yet, even though Marie Christine did not murder her children for revenge, when Dante shows up at her house and realizes what she's done, and when she sees that she has beaten him and broken him, I think she feels revenge. She has triumphed over him and is free of him at last; she's been freed of his arrogance and her awful love, in a way that murdering his new wife could never have achieved. The price was too high, however, and after this comes the chaos with which the story ends.

Marie Christine as a character is fascinating, a real puzzle. Medea, the model for Marie Christine, was the product of a barbaric culture, in which violence and ritual sacrifice were acceptable behavior. Marie Christine, on the other hand, is the product of a genteel upbringing in a world untouched by violence. She is not a criminal, and her personality runs against the grain of all that is known about those who murder. She's not mad, or psychopathic, or narcissistic, or anti-social. Indeed, she not only seems but is perfectly normal in every respect-except for that ready and easy ability to kill people, as evidenced by the bodies in her wake. In real life, you would not likely find a Marie Christine among the nation's murderers. Her peculiar pathology could exist only in a fable.

However, the prisons are full of women who have come to ruin through their relationships with men. As the old James Brown song has it, "This Is A Man's World."

Like all the other women in the story, Marie Christine is totally dependent upon men, who rule the world. "We are ruled by our brothers. We are ruled by our husbands. We jump at the voices of our masters and do as they say. We are bartered and traded," she complains. In a very real sense, women lack power over their own lives. Even Marie Christine, with all the magical power of voodoo she has, is unable to use it to control her own fate.

She, like all the women in the story, is not only dependent on men, but takes her identity, even her existence, from them. One way or another, they just surrender themselves and their lives to men in search of paradise in "the miracles and mysteries in his eyes [and] arms."

It's a bad trade-off. The men in the story are creeps, exploiters, abusers‹all dogs, one worse than the other. Marie Christine's brothers want to control her for their own purposes. Magdalena, Marie Christine's confidante, leaves one male abuser only to be abandoned, with her children, by another. Marie Christine's mother was abandoned by her father after he had ruthlessly exploited her life and body for his personal gratification. Dante's political mentor and his henchmen are loathsome thugs who threaten to kill Marie Christine because she's politically inconvenient. And Dante is unspeakable in the way he uses Marie Christine's money and magic to solve his own problems and then dumps her for another woman, who can give him better opportunities. It is no accident that the most repugnant character in the entire story is Dante, the consummate politician who says whatever is necessary to get his way.

Though there are very real political, legal, and economic reasons for women to be so much at the mercy of men, composer/lyricist Michael John LaChiusa simply makes love a kind of magic that trumps even voodoo. Yet it is in exploring that phenomenon that he connects Marie Christine to the real world once again. "Once you fall under the spell of another you will lose yourself and I lost myself," Marie Christine's mother tells her. "I lost myself to love, Marie," she says.

The operative concept in this confession is not "love" but "lost myself." Marie Christine, who follows in her mother's footsteps despite the warning, eagerly offers Dante all she has: "I will give you my money. I will give you my magic. I will open my body. I will bear you our children. . . . I will steal from my brothers. I will kill if you wish." In exchange for this, "I will take what you give me." More pathetic still is that she makes her very existence contingent upon him: "I will live if you give me your love." Worse yet, all this comes after she has caught him trying to seduce her maid!

In "Marie Christine," all the women are exploited and abused. But this doesn't mean they're necessarily innocents. Indeed, they've cooperated in their exploitation and victimization. Marie Christine should have known better, yet she surrenders everything to follow a ruthless exploiter, choosing to believe his empty promises and lies, until he uses her up, then discards her like a soiled handkerchief.

Unfortunately, "Marie Christine" is ultimately about destructive relationships, and that story doesn't end, and it cannot be contained inside a theater. From genital mutilation in Africa to bed-burning in India to veils in Saudi Arabia to honor-killings in Brazil, much of the world's female population is treated badly or dominated by men to give, trade, barter, rape, abuse, beat, even kill them with little compunction and often with impunity. And, while the situation is admittedly better in the United States, too many women are slaves within their marriages, exploited and abused, their own human potential smothered for the benefit of their husband-masters.

Women around the world are often physically, psychologically, and financially dependent upon men. In America, women's powerlessness is less obvious and, frequently, like Marie Christine's, at least partially of their own making. Calling it "love," women get into relationships with men who batter them, torment them emotionally, and drive them to all manner of self-destructive behavior. They continue in these relationships even when they see that the men are ruthless curs and the relationships unhealthy. They know better, but they don't know how to get out, how to separate themselves from the men who dominate, even terrorize, their lives. These women end up in hospitals, in psychiatrists' offices, in alcohol- and drug-rehab centers, in early graves, and in prison.

A few years ago, I was invited to be the featured speaker at a Christmas party at the only women's prison in Louisiana. I returned with a profound sadness for the women. A large percentage of the women behind bars are there because they were willing to "do anything" for some man. Some sold dope, some stole, some prostituted themselves, some committed armed robbery. Some killed the very men who controlled their lives and made them miserable. There is an inescapable correlation between female criminality and violence and the men those women love and follow. Call it the Marie Christine Syndrome.

But I would like to think that the women who believe wholeheartedly in the value of love have it right. Because love adds beauty and fullness to our lives; it makes our existence worth living. In fact, the only force that has the power to lift our lives above lust and animalistic procreation to perpetuate the species, to transform it into something glorious - is love.