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Killed her two children after she had financial issues. She pretended she didn't kill her own children, even holding a birthday party at her son's grave for the media.

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a Spotify playlist that goes through Medea's story :)

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Ever wanted to hear the story of Medea through a carefully curated playlist of edgy teen girl songs? Yes, obviously. From doe-eyed love songs for Jason to Medea's ultimate revenge, join us on this musical journey for one of classics' most famous women. Follow this link for our corresponding Spotify playlist!

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Io: The UT Austin Department of Classics Blog

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Please Don't Stop the Music: Medea's Mixtape

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Ever wanted to hear the story of Medea through a carefully curated playlist of edgy teen girl songs? Yes, obviously. From doe-eyed love songs for Jason to Medea's ultimate revenge, join us on this musical journey for one of classics' most famous women. Follow this link for our corresponding Spotify playlist!

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Michael Jordan and Medea both do not make exceptions for children

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Michael Jordan and Medea both do not make exceptions for children

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Michael Jordan refused to miss 3 free throws and denied an entire basketball camp of kids free Jordan's, saying "F*** them kids."

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT https://t.co/aUrNtTU39D

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT pic.twitter.com/aUrNtTU39D
— B/R Kicks (@brkicks) January 31, 2019

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT https://t.co/aUrNtTU39D

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT https://t.co/aUrNtTU39D

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That time @CP3 bet Michael Jordan if he missed three shots then his whole basketball camp gets free Jordans. 😂 #TBT

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This is an iconic breakup song; there's a blend of anger and sadness, similar to Medea's story.

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Rachel Cusk on Medea's Motives For Killing her Children

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Rachel Cusk on Medea's Motives For Killing her Children

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Context: Rachel Cusk produced a version of Medea in London's Almeida Theatre

“I guess there are a couple of women on the planet who murder their children, but these days we see that as psychotic behaviour, those people are mentally ill, they suffer a great deal and they don’t kill their children for the reasons Medea kills her children,” Cusk explains. “You’re never going to go and see Medea and think, ‘Oh yeah, I was a bit careless with that carving knife, I got a bit close to stabbing my child to death the other day.’ What I want is for people to think, ‘Here are some things I recognise, little echoes of my own experience.’ Medea has everything to do with lots of people’s lives and I couldn’t write a play in a modern setting about a woman who kills her children.”

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hen the curtain goes up on Rachel Cusk's version of Medea at London's Almeida theatre, her whole family will be in the audience. The writer says she is tempted to spend the evening "around the corner in a pub with a bag over my head", but talking in her agent's offices about her first experience of play writing, she sounds more determined than afraid. Rupert Goold, the director, has been an "astonishing mentor", she says. Writing for him has been like learning Chinese, or playing tennis with Roger Federer: every time she thought she had played her best shot, it was batted back.

When I was allowed to read the script a few weeks ago it was still a work in progress, with ideas being passed back and forth between Cusk, Goold and the actors. Cusk says she and Goold have tussled over the fate of Medea's children, whom in the original version she murders as part of her revenge against Jason, the husband who has abandoned her. Both the writer and director know that Cusk's decision to spare the children their deaths at their mother's hand is provocative. What audiences and critics will make of this, and the less bloody but still tragic alternative she has come up with, they are about to find out.

Euripides wants to liberate women but he is worried about what is going to happen to children if women are liberated

Cusk's version of Euripides' drama, first performed in Greece almost 2,500 years ago, is about as modern as you could imagine. Settings, characters and language are all contemporary; the chorus emits what Cusk calls the threatening "jungle noises" of a gaggle of mothers at the school gates. Euripides, she thinks, was a feminist whose work "suffers massively" at the hands of traditionalists who take it too literally.

"I guess there are a couple of women on the planet who murder their children, but these days we see that as psychotic behaviour, those people are mentally ill, they suffer a great deal and they don't kill their children for the reasons Medea kills her children," Cusk explains. "You're never going to go and see Medea and think, 'Oh yeah, I was a bit careless with that carving knife, I got a bit close to stabbing my child to death the other day.' What I want is for people to think, 'Here are some things I recognise, little echoes of my own experience.' Medea has everything to do with lots of people's lives and I couldn't write a play in a modern setting about a woman who kills her children."

Last year, Cusk published a novel, , which was shortlisted for the Baileys, Folio and Goldsmith's prizes, and which she says received more praise than any of her other books; she is working on a sequel set in London, in which she hopes to meet a challenge she has set herself to write about sex. As well as the new novel, she would like to write more plays. She has been reading Greek drama since Freud switched her on to it, but didn't like going to the theatre much, and laughs as she describes how, when she recently saw Euripides' The Bacchae, she was delighted to find it was a captioned performance, meaning she could read as well as watch it. But working on Medea she has found she enjoys the company and liveliness of theatre, and already has a sketch for her own version of The Bacchae in her head: "Euripides wants to liberate women but he is really worried about what is going to happen to children if women are liberated. The Bacchae works for me as a little fable about feminism and its consequences."

Feminism, the experience of women and the fate of children are themes that dominate not only her new life in drama but her whole writing career. She separates that career into three phases. The first began soon after she left Oxford, where she studied English. Brought up a Catholic, and influenced by Evelyn Waugh, she wrote three novels, beginning with the prize-winning Saving Agnes, which were psychologically astute and stylish black comedies.

The second phase lasted roughly a decade, from her early 30s to early 40s. Married and bringing up two daughters, first in Oxford, then Bristol and Brighton, Cusk published four novels, including 2005's and 2006's Arlington Park, that were formally more complicated, and continued to assert her interest in contemporary subjective experience and relationships. These books were less fun than her early ones and their author could be fierce. In an article for the Guardian in 2005 she decried what she saw as the middle-brow philistinism of the women in a book group she left when none of them could find a good word to say about Chekhov.

Her novels, though not to every taste, were admired. James Lasdun called her one of the few writers "in possession of a style". Hilary Mantel defended her against the charge laid by another (male) critic that she was too clever by half. Arlington Park was on the Orange prize shortlist.

This period was bookended by two memoirs, both of which saw Cusk embroiled in a new kind of critical wrangle. These days A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, is seen as a milestone in women's memoirs and a brave attempt to say unpopular things about having babies, but when it came out 14 years ago some readers disapproved of the emphasis Cusk placed on her own ambivalence.

"When I describe having a baby, I'm not saying, 'I'm so important because I'm having a baby,' I'm saying that this is still an experience that is not understood because, OK, having a baby is pretty eternal but women are changing, so what it means to have a baby is changing all the time," she explains. "None of these things is resolved and all I'm trying to do is push the line a little bit further in terms of what you're allowed to say. That to me is a principle and it has a moral worth that is nothing to do with some middle-class woman sitting there navel-gazing or wittering on - that is not what I'm doing."

Even so, Cusk, who now lives in London, says she was shocked by the reaction to her second memoir, about the breakdown of her relationship. Julie Burchill called Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation "brilliant". Elsewhere Cusk was pilloried and one hostile piece won the Hatchet Job of the Year award.

Kate Fleetwood in Medea at the Almeida. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

"I didn't quite know you weren't allowed to talk about divorce either," is her comment now. "It's interesting to find I draw out this intolerance, because what it proves is that there is a taboo, there is censoring going on. But I wish I hadn't had to prove it quite so violently." Though she can cope with most criticism, she remains angry with journalists who claimed to feel concerned about her children in articles it could only pain them to read.

"The misuse of the term 'narcissism' in relation to my work is nauseating," she says. "My life is the trash going into the incinerator to power the book I'm trying to write."

For a time, Cusk felt her creative self had died: " Aftermath was very much the last iteration of a big phase of my life and I think I knew I had to dismantle my whole writing process because I had become a different person and I couldn't write those books any more. I had to write a book that was about the new things but I didn't know what the new things were."

For Medea, she worked her way through several translations, watched Lars von Trier's 1988 TV movie version and embarked on discusssions with an academic expert. The breakthrough came when she realised she could not see the space-time dimensions of a play on a computer screen. She swapped her laptop for big pieces of paper spread across a table, and says the experience was a liberation - "an example of how you are freer than you think".

But while the play and her most recent novel, with its stripped-back style, are a departure from her previous work, they are also connected to it and each other in interesting ways. Medea, Cusk says firmly, is "about divorce, not motherhood", and Goold, the Almeida's artistic director, wrote to her because he had read Aftermath, which contains many Greek literary references. Meanwhile, Outline was not only set in Athens but inspired by the Odyssey, and "the idea of things being told afterwards, and that really being the basis for all narrative. In Outline writing becomes talking," she explains.

Cusk wrote the scenes between Medea and Jason, the warring couple, first: "The arguments I wrote straight away, because they to me are the most amazing thing about the play ... This couple fighting and fighting is an eternal human predicament. Love turning to hate, it's like splitting the atom, such destructiveness comes of it."

The unsympathetic chorus is inspired in part by her own bad experiences at the hands of her female peers. Cusk was bullied at boarding school "for long enough for it to have had far-reaching consequences", she says, and it has taken years to unpick the effects of her unhappy childhood. Though she has a good relationship with her sister and radiates pride in her daughters, she has never found a group of women to which she felt she belonged. Part of her discomfort in the early years of her daughters' lives, she says, was that "I didn't quite realise when I had children how much you go back to school".

In Medea as Euripides wrote it, the heroine kills her children with a knife in her final act of revenge, and while Cusk has modified the action to make it more comprehensible in the present day, she believes the fate of the children speaks to what she calls the "moral cynicism of the divorce world". Perhaps surprisingly, at least to those readers who saw her as insufficiently protective of her own children's privacy when she wrote about their family life, Cusk is unfashionably firm about the damaging consequences of divorce.

"Everybody desperately wants to believe that children are fine and there are lots of those lines in the play, lines I hate and that my daughters also hate: 'children are very resilient' and all that sort of stuff they get told the whole time," she says. "And I think: no they're not, children are the most vulnerable of us all, they can change shape really easily and that's what's dangerous. Of course everyone wants to believe that what looks OK is OK, because you don't want to think that with your selfishness you've damaged these people you've bothered to bring into the world. But I think the discourse about divorce is inadequate as far as children are concerned. Children of divorce are split down the middle and it's very hard for their voices to be heard."

School taught me that life was hard and people were cruel

For Cusk, "the truthful idea of damage to children" is the heart of the play: "this is what Medea sees and this is what Euripides sees, and it's so good that someone sees that it absolutely relies on the institutionalised culture of motherhood to mop up and conceal the essential cynicism of divorce. What happens is: man leaves woman, children are damaged, and woman is expected to continue their lives and her life as a self-sacrificing pretence. The fact of this damage to children is covered up by everybody and Medea doesn't do that, she won't do it, she says: 'These are our children and if you leave me the grounds for their existence are not there any more.' They are cancelled, in a way."

For all her conviction, is Cusk worried what reviewers will say about her play? The reaction to theatre is so swift compared with the drip-drip of book reviews, with the critics sharing the same physical space. She says she isn't - that it feels less lonely than with novels because she didn't make Medea on her own.

Has she felt let down, in the past, by female critics who failed to appreciate what she saw as feminist writing?

"School taught me that life was hard and people were cruel," she says. DH Lawrence, for her "the greatest English novelist", was "totally abused even in his obituaries". She doesn't do social media, doesn't know which of her books is the best seller, and says awards ceremonies feel like "swimming-suit competitions".

Is there something in her that thrives on an embattled, outsider status? It seems unarguable that painful life experience has fuelled her creatively.

"Part of change is very painful and very risky, but it is the only possible route I think to those new forms of expression. I'm very pleased that I have found, for now anyway, a new vein of creativity."

She says this phase too may come to an end, that life may one day again stop delivering the material she requires. Last month, she gave up her job teaching creative writing. But there is no way back to what she calls "the happy-ending version of life" and for now, along with her fiction, there is tragedy.

"The most interesting bit of Medea is obviously the end, when she goes up in the chariot and is triumphant," Cusk says. "I've thought an awful lot about that. Some kind of moral hardness and correctness delivers her into this transfigured place, and the question of what comes next is interesting to me."

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Rachel Cusk interview: 'Medea is about divorce ... A couple fighting is an eternal predicament. Love turning to hate'

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hen the curtain goes up on Rachel Cusk's version of Medea at London's Almeida theatre, her whole family will be in the audience. The writer says she is tempted to spend the evening "around the corner in a pub with a bag over my head", but talking in her agent's offices about her first experience of play writing, she sounds more determined than afraid.

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I think this picture really captures how intimidating Madea is portrayed within the text. Very powerful.

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Medea escaping

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Medea- Play Rendition by Schwarz Theater

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Medea- Play Rendition by Schwarz Theater

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https://open.spotify.com/track/4EWCNWgDS8707fNSZ1oaA5?si=0102ec30ca634a6e

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Medea kills her children which makes them sad.

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Medea kills her children which makes them sad.

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This is an interesting artifact that shows the flight of Medea after she kills her children

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an analyzed Spotify playlist that coincides with Medea's story!!

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Ever wanted to hear the story of Medea through a carefully curated playlist of edgy teen girl songs? Yes, obviously. From doe-eyed love songs for Jason to Medea's ultimate revenge, join us on this musical journey for one of classics' most famous women. Follow this link for our corresponding Spotify playlist!

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Io: The UT Austin Department of Classics Blog

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Please Don't Stop the Music: Medea's Mixtape

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Ever wanted to hear the story of Medea through a carefully curated playlist of edgy teen girl songs? Yes, obviously. From doe-eyed love songs for Jason to Medea's ultimate revenge, join us on this musical journey for one of classics' most famous women. Follow this link for our corresponding Spotify playlist!

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Euripides' Medea is fraught with the devastating kind of stuff we expect from an ancient Greek tragedy. In the play Medea's husband Jason has abandoned her and their two sons to be with Glauce, King Creon's daughter. Utterly ravaged and seeing no options or solution for her pain, Medea takes matters into her own hands and kills her two sons.

Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne bring a contemporary Medea to BAM
Photo by Caitlin Cronenberg

When writer/director Simon Stone set out to create a new adaptation of Medea, he wanted to make it something completely relatable and updated. "What I do is basically take old plays and bring them into the contemporary world," says Stone of his reimagined work that is currently playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Now playing at BAM Harvey Theater, the thought provoking play is even hilarious sometimes. "The great thing about the script is it's very funny," says Dylan Baker who stars in the production with Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. "People will say, "What?! Isn't this a tragedy?"

In the play's early moments, this version of doesn't feel entirely related to the Euripides classic. That was a deliberate move for the out-of-the-box director. "Watching the play, the first shock is: how is this in any way THAT play?" says Stone of his piece where modern-day characters speak in contemporary dialogue. There isn't even an actual person in the play named Medea. "You see real people doing normal things on stage that doesn't feel like it has anything to do with a Greek classic," says Stone.

The second shock of the production is even more extreme. "Once you get used to watching a contemporary play, you let go of whatever relationship you might have to the original," explains Stone. And then presto, everything changes. "You discover this actually IS that play," says Stone. "This can happen to people in the world that we live in."

In fact, this Medea is partially based a true story of a Kansas City physician who was charged with setting fire to her home which killed two of her three children. She was also convicted of attempted murder for attempting to poison her cheating husband.

In Stone's play Anna, (Rose Byrne), is a brilliant research scientist, who spent years making her fellow research colleague/ husband, Lucas, truly shine. She ends up sacrificing her own success for his. When she discovers Lucas' infidelity, she completely unravels. And then it dawns on us that we're entangled in Euripides' Medea territory. "It's easier to watch a show when you can distance yourself from it all. You think, this is not me. It's old witches, kings and warriors," says Stone. "Then all of a sudden, with this production, you realize this actually happens in our world. These horrific things happen to us. That is an acknowledgement of human nature that is not comfortable. But it's true."

As Cannavale observes this Medea ends up so relatable. "We go on a journey with Anna and see a woman who is desperately trying NOT to lose her mind. That's is different than watching somebody lose their mind. When you see somebody fighting not to lose their mind nor fall prey to their darkest thoughts, it's something we can relate to," says the actor. "You sit in a theater and think, gosh, I remember going through some dark times. It's a struggle. And it's really hard when you have to maintain a family and children. When you're going through something like that, your life doesn't usually get placed on pause. People will hopefully have compassion because they recognize it in their own life."
Jeryl Brunner: What went through your mind when you heard about this production?
Rose Byrne: It stopped me in my tracks. This is not like any other kind of experience. The opportunity came out of the blue. It was one of those very surprising jobs. I had known Simon [Stone] socially for years in Australia and seen many of his productions. At first I was very nervous. It's a huge ask on a family for both parents to be working in a play. My main concern is how do we keep our family happy. But we figured it out. The pros all outweighed the cons.

Bobby Cannavale: Simon Stone's name jumped out at me. I had seen his production of Yerma and knew I wanted to work with him. That he wanted me to do this play with Rose was beyond for me. We enjoy working together. We've done it many times before, but have never done a play together. She is incredible on stage and knows how much I love working in the theater. It was another opportunity for us to share an experience together. We really like being with each other.
Brunner: Rose, what is great about working with Bobby?
Byrne: Bobby is an an actor's actor. In all the scenes he's so present. He never tries to steal anything. He just tries to give and make it better. Bobby is never trying to overtake a scene. A lot of actors can be greedy but he is not like that. Also, his first love is theater, so he is never happier than when he's in a rehearsal space. He's fully himself. He also has enough energy for ten men and brings all his curiosity and wonder.
Brunner: How do you make these characters so human and compassionate?
Cannavale: We play two scientists. They are working Joes with a family. People can relate to that. Relationships are hard. I mean, that's an understatement. This couple works long hours together. They are trying to raise a family together. He is not quite as talented as she is, but she helps him. A schism happens and he betrays her. Those kinds of things happen in relationships. Anybody sitting in the theater knows somebody who has gone through something like that.

Byrne: The text that Simon has written has such compassion for Anna in a way I never expected. You feel for this woman who is broken. Simon has told the story as a way of examining the human condition and a relationship. He explores everything a woman does in a marriage: working, being a mother, a wife, a colleague, a boss. It's a great chance to explore all of that. So the shock value of Medea wears off. Once I read it, I thought, this is about how you get to that broken place and what happened before. What are the steps it took to get to that? That made me have empathy and believe that I could find a way into her.
Brunner: What inspired you to bring Simon production of Medea to BAM?
B AM Artistic Director, David Binder: I saw the play Yerma that Simon Stone did at The Park Avenue Armory. It was one of the most striking, arresting, upsetting, surprising theatrical pieces I have seen in many years. So when I was recently appointed at BAM, Simon Stone was at the very top of my list. I called him and said, "What can we do together?" He and I began to forge a conversation with David Lan, who is our theater associate at BAM who worked with Simon on Yerma and was artistic director at the Young Vic for 18 years. And Simon doesn't do a typical kitchen sink drama. It's striking, original, unique and singular. And you need actors who are from the theater and up for that kind of adventure. In Bobby and Rose we have that.

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Rose Byrne On Creating A Modern-Day Medea

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Euripides' Medea is fraught with the devastating kind of stuff we expect from an ancient Greek tragedy. In the play Medea's husband Jason has abandoned her and their two sons to be with Glauce, King Creon's daughter. Utterly ravaged and seeing no options or solution for her pain, Medea takes matters into her own hands and kills her two sons.

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Statue of La Llorona on an island of Xochimilco, Mexico, 2015

(Latin American Spanish: ; ' the Crying Woman, the Wailer ') is a vengeful ghost in Mexican folklore who is said to roam near bodies of water mourning her children whom she drowned in a jealous rage after discovering her husband was cheating on her.

Early colonial times provided evidence that the lore is pre-Hispanic, originating in the central highlands. However, La Llorona is most commonly associated with the colonial era and the dynamic between Spanish conquistadores and indigenous women. The most common lore about La Llorona includes her initially being an Indigenous woman who murdered her own children, which she bore from a wealthy Spaniard, after he abandoned her. The villainous qualities of La Llorona, including infanticide and the murdering of one's own blood is assumed to be connected to the narrative surrounding Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche, or Maltinzin in her original nomenclature. Today, the lore of La Llorona is well known in Mexico and the Southwestern United States.

The earliest documentation of La Llorona is traced back to 1550 in Mexico City. But there are theories about her story being connected to specific Aztec mythological creation stories. "The Hungry Woman" includes a wailing woman constantly crying for food, which has been compared to La Llorona's signature nocturnal wailing for her children. The motherly nature of La Llorona's tragedy has been compared to Chihuacoatl, an Aztec goddess deity of motherhood. Her seeking of children to keep for herself is significantly compared to Coatlicue, known as "Our Lady Mother" or Tonantsi (who's also comparable to the Virgen de Guadalupe, another significant mother figure in Mexican-culture), also a monster that devours filth or sin.

The legend of La Llorona is traditionally told throughout Mexico, Central America and northern South America. La Llorona is sometimes conflated with La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as ' interpreter and also bore his son. La Malinche is considered both the mother of the modern Mexican people and a symbol of national treachery for her role in aiding the Spanish.

Stories of weeping female phantoms are common in the folklore of both Iberian and Amerindian cultures. Scholars have pointed out similarities between La Llorona and the Cihuacōātl of Aztec mythology, as well as Eve and Lilith of Hebrew mythology. Author Ben Radford's investigation into the legend of La Llorona, published in Mysterious New Mexico, found common elements of the story in the German folktale "Die Weisse Frau" dating from 1486. La Llorona also bears a resemblance to the ancient Greek tale of the demigoddess Lamia, in which Hera, Zeus' wife, learned of his affair with Lamia and killed all the children Lamia had with Zeus. Out of jealousy over the loss of her own children, Lamia kills other women's children.

The Florentine Codex is an important text that originated in late Mexico in 1519, a quote from which is, "The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting. She cried out loudly at night, saying, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever." Sometimes she said, "Oh my children, where am I to take you?"

While the roots of the La Llorona legend appear to be pre-Hispanic, the earliest published reference to the legend is a 19th-century sonnet by Mexican poet Manuel Carpio. The poem makes no reference to infanticide, rather La Llorona is identified as the ghost of a woman named Rosalia who was murdered by her husband.

The legend has a wide variety of details and versions. In a typical version of the legend, a beautiful woman named María marries a rich ranchero / conquistador to whom she bears two children. One day, María sees her husband with another woman and in a fit of blind rage, she drowns their children in a river, which she immediately regrets. Unable to save them and consumed by guilt, she drowns herself as well but is unable to enter the afterlife, forced to be in purgatory and roam this earth until she finds her children. In another version of the story, her children are illegitimate, and she drowns them so that their father cannot take them away to be raised by his new wife. Recurring themes in variations on the La Llorona myth include a white, wet dress, nocturnal wailing, and an association with water.

The legend of La Llorona is deeply rooted in Mexican popular culture. Her story is told to children to encourage them not to wander off in the dark and near bodies of water such as rivers and lakes alone. Her spirit is often evoked in artwork, such as that of Alejandro Colunga. La Cihuacoatle, Leyenda de la Llorona is a yearly waterfront theatrical performance of the legend of La Llorona set in the canals of the Xochimilco borough of Mexico City, which was established in 1993 to coincide with the Day of the Dead.

According to the local legend, in Guatemala City lived a woman who had an affair with a lover. She became pregnant and gave birth to a child named Juan de la Cruz who she drowned so her husband would not know. The woman was condemned in the afterlife to search for her murdered son in every place where there's a pool of water. She does that by crying out for him-hence her moniker of the Wailing Woman ( La Llorona). It is a popular scary legend that in one iteration or another has been told to generations of children. The terrifying cry of "Oh, my children!!" (¡Ay mis hijos!) is well known due to the story. Additionally, one peculiar detail is that when a person hears the cry from afar means that the ghost is nearby, but if the cry is heard nearby, it means the ghost is afar. Someone unlucky enough to face the specter is "won over" to the afterlife, never to be seen again.[citation needed ]

In the Southwestern United States, the story of La Llorona is told to scare children into good behavior, sometimes specifically to deter children from playing near dangerous water. Also told to them is that her cries are heard as she walks around the street or near bodies of water to scare children from wandering around, resembling the stories of El Cucuy. In Chumash mythology indigenous to Southern California, La Llorona is linked to the nunašɨš, a mythological creature with a cry similar to that of a newborn baby. It is a very popular story.

The tale of La Llorona is set in the Venezuelan Llanos during the colonial period. La Llorona is said to be the spirit of a woman that died of sorrow after her children were killed, either by herself or by her family. Families traditionally place wooden crosses above their doors to ward off such spirits.

In Eastern Europe, the modern Rusalka is a type of water spirit in Slavic mythology. They come to be after a woman drowns due to suicide or murder, especially if they had an unwanted pregnancy. Then they must stay in this world for a period of time.

The Greek legend of Jason and Medea also features the motif of a woman who murders her children as an act of revenge against her husband, who has left her for another woman.

Actress representing La Llorona in The Mexican Dream, 2003

The story of La Llorona first appeared on film in 1933's , filmed in Mexico. René Cardona's 1960 film was also shot in Mexico, as was the 1963 horror film, The Curse of the Crying Woman directed by Rafael Baledón.

The 2008 Mexican horror film Kilometer 31 is inspired by the legend of La Llorona. Additionally the early 2000s saw a spate of low-budget movies based on La Llorona, including:

La Llorona is the primary antagonist in the 2007 movie . In the 2011 Mexican animated film La Leyenda de la Llorona, she is portrayed as a more sympathetic character, whose children die in an accident rather than at their mother's hands.

In the 2017 Pixar film , " La Llorona", the Mexican folk song popularized by Andres Henestrosa in 1941 is sung by Alanna Ubach in her role as Mamá Imelda, joined by Antonio Sol as the singing voice of Ernesto de la Cruz.

In July 2019, James Wan, Gary Dauberman and Emilie Gladstone produced a film titled The Curse of La Llorona for Warner Bros. Pictures. The film was directed by Michael Chaves and stars Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez and Marisol Ramirez as La Llorona.

Also in 2019, Jayro Bustamante directed the Guatemalan film , starring María Mercedes Coroy, which screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

The Legend of La Llorona was a film released in January 2022 and stars Danny Trejo, Autumn Reeser, and Antonio Cupo.

Mexican playwright Josefina López wrote "Unconquered Spirits", which uses the myth of La Llorona as a plot device. The play premiered at California State University, Northridge's Little Theatre in 1995.

Nancy Farmer's 2002 science fiction novel, The House of the Scorpion includes references to La Llorona.

The legend of La Llorona is discussed in Jaquira Díaz's 2019 memoir, Ordinary Girls:

"The scariest part was not that La Llorona was a monster, or that she came when you called her name three times in the dark, or that she could come into your room at night and take you from your bed like she'd done with her own babies. It was that once she'd been a person, a woman, a mother. And then a moment, an instant, a split second later, she was a monster."

The novel Paola Santiago and the River of Tears, the first part of a young adult trilogy by Tehlor Kay Mejia, is based on the legend of La Llorona.

Rodolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima references La Llorona, describing her as a spirit of the river without mentioning her origins.

"Advice from La Llorona" by Deborah A. Miranda is a poem exploring grief and loss.

" La Llorona" is a Mexican folk song popularized by Andres Henestrosa in 1941. It has since been covered by various musicians, including Chavela Vargas, Joan Baez, Lila Downs, and Rosalía.

North American singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela's debut album (1997) explored the dark mysteries of Latin folklore. She combined a variety of musical genres including klezmer, gypsy jazz and Mexican folk music, all in the Spanish language. The album was certified Platinum in Canada, and it earned her a Canadian Juno Award for Best Global Artist in 1998.

Manic Hispanic, a rock band from Los Angeles, California, have a song titled "She Turned Into Llorona" on their 2003 album Mijo Goes To Jr. College.

La Llorona is an antagonist in the TV series Supernatural, portrayed by Sarah Shahi in the pilot episode and by Shanae Tomasevich in "Moriah" and season 15.

La Llorona appears in the Victor and Valentino episode "The Lonely Haunts 3: La Llorona" voiced by Vanessa Marshall. Contrary to the usual depictions, this version of La Llorona is good and simply lonely and claims to have had twenty kids who had all grown up and left her; implying that she suffers from Empty nest syndrome.

La Llorona appears in the Craig of the Creek episode "The Legend of the Library" voiced by Carla Tassara. Craig and the Stump Kids visit their friend Stacks at the local library to get out of the rain. When the power goes out and their fellow Creek Kids begin disappearing, Stacks believes that La Llorona is to blame. In the end, it is revealed that the "ghost" was actually Lorraine, the substitute librarian who is very serious about her job. She makes the kids promise to take good care of the library along with a warning, showing a ghostly face at the same time. Whether or not Lorraine was in fact La Llorona or the face was imagined is left ambiguous.

La Llorona appears in the episode "Chapter 97: Ghost Stories". The characters tell ghost stories about people related to them or the town that had died. La Llorona is one. She haunts Sweetwater River and she also manages to possess Toni and take Betty's unborn child away.

La Llorona is portrayed by the drag queen, Mirage, for the ball episode in season 16 of Rupauls Drag Race. The theme for the look was entitled "Significant Mother" and the queens had to showcase a look inspired by a famous mother.

La Llorona appears as a collectible demon in Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei series of role-playing games, making her first appearance in the 1997 installment, Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers for the Sega Saturn.

Perez, Domino Renee. (2008). There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. Austin: U of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0292718128.

Mathews, Holly F. 1992. The directive force of morality tales in a Mexican community. In Human motives and cultural models, edited by R.G.D'Andrade and C. Strauss, 127-62. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Norget, Kristin (2006). Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-13688-9.

Ray John de Aragon, The Legend of La Llorona, Sunstone Press, 2006. ISBN 9781466429796.

Belinda Vasquez Garcia, The Witch Narratives Reincarnation, Magic Prose Publishing, 2012. ISBN 978-0-86534-505-8

Werner, Michael S. (1997). Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society & Culture - Vol. 1. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. ISBN 1-884964-31-1.

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(Latin American Spanish: ; ' the Crying Woman, the Wailer ') is a vengeful ghost in Mexican folklore who is said to roam near bodies of water mourning her children whom she drowned in a jealous rage after discovering her husband was cheating on her.

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A tale of love, betrayal and murder is playing out in the Malibu hills this month. The Greek tragedy "Medea" has been rewritten for the modern age and set in Southern California. It involves a difficult border crossing, an isolated garment worker, her straying husband and, of course, vengeance. NPR's Jason DeRose reports.

JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: Playwright Luis Alfaro has had success planting Greek plays into contemporary U.S. soil with Latino characters. The MacArthur Genius fellow has retold the stories of Electra and Oedipus Rex as "Electricidad" and "Oedipus El Rey." So when he chose to take on border crossing and exile, he knew which Greek tragedy to turn to.

LUIS ALFARO: The ultimate immigrant in exile is Medea.

DEROSE: The 2,400-year-old plot from Euripides tells the story of a sorceress who flees her home country with her lover, the hero Jason, and settles in Corinth, only to lose him to the daughter of the king. The play is now "Mojada: A Medea In Los Angeles." Jason is now Hason, who works in construction.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "MOJADA")

JUSTIN HUEN: (As Hason) Armida gave me another promotion.

SABINA ZUNIGA VARELA: (As Medea) She did?

HUEN: (As Hason) Half the day, I'm in the front office with her.

VARELA: (As Medea) In the office with her. You don't think having a lady boss is strange?

HUEN: (As Hason) Nah, she's older than me.

VARELA: (As Medea) You're older than me.

HUEN: (As Jason) It's not the same.

VARELA: (As Medea) It's worse.

HUEN: (As Jason) You have nothing to worry about. We like our women to be girls and then mothers and then grandmothers and finally, saints.

DEROSE: You can guess what happens next - not just betrayal of the relationship, but also a cultural betrayal.

VARELA: And you slowly start seeing the seams rip apart.

DEROSE: Sabina Zuniga Varela plays Medea.

VARELA: "Mojada" really centers on, I believe, the deconstruction of a family after going through trauma, being disconnected from the land and how that affects a structure built on love and trust and history.

DEROSE: Varela wants audiences to understand what it means for many immigrants to leave Mexico for the U.S.

VARELA: People talk about this is a land of opportunity, and we believe this play highlights it's a land of sacrifice. And it really highlights what people give up in order to obtain this dream to have more for their children, to have more for their pride and for their family.

DEROSE: The pain of that sacrifice is, in some ways, eased by those who've come before, which is something playwright Luis Alfaro saw when researching where in LA to set his "Medea." He landed in the immigrant-rich neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

ALFARO: I started to meet a lot of people that were undocumented, working on the streets helping other people who are undocumented on just really basic things, like the kind of ID you needed to have, the kind of jobs you should be watching out for.

DEROSE: Setting the play in Los Angeles, and performing it here as well, means the audience is keenly aware of the advantage people take of undocumented workers - cheap construction labor, cheap sewing labor, cheap yard work.

MARY LOUISE HART: You feel that you're all in it together. You're not really separate psychologically.

DEROSE: Mary Louise Hart is the curator for classical drama at the Getty Villa, where the play is being produced. She says there's power in how audiences respond to these characters - both the admiration of hard work and hope in the future, but also in the darker side of ambition.

HART: Well, Medea was a terrible person. She was bad. She was evil. She was a killer, and she was willing to cross the line to get what she wanted.

DEROSE: But Hart says Luis Alfaro's Medea is one with which contemporary audiences can and should empathize.

HART: And he can make you understand ideas and impulses and needs that you've not only never thought of, but once you realize what they are, you find them repulsive, yet you understand exactly why that is going to happen.

DEROSE: Once Medea and Hason decide to flee Mexico, once they cross the border illegally, once they try to lead American lives, playwright Luis Alfaro says their fates seem sealed. Alfaro hopes seeing the play will help audiences ask themselves difficult questions about the fragility of their own lives.

ALFARO: What does it mean when you feel that you have to sacrifice a child in order to make a better world? What does it feel like to be so wounded that you feel you have to punish somebody by ending a life?

DEROSE: And Alfaro wants "Mojada: A Medea In Los Angeles" to bridge the cultural chasm between new immigrants and longtime residents. In fact, that's one of the reasons he uses the word mojada for his title. It's a derogatory term for a person who illegally crosses the border.

ALFARO: It's hard to get audiences, especially in these very difficult, divisive times that we're in, just for people to see themselves in others. And one way that I challenge my audience to do that is to say we are Greek; we are Chicano; we are American. We are all of those things, but we belong to the world.

DEROSE: Luis Alfaro believes we go to the theater to become better people. And we learn to do that not by shying away from those transgressive feelings - rage, jealousy, vengeance - but rather by confronting them head on. Jason DeRose, NPR News, Los Angeles.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Set In Los Angeles, Greek Tragedy 'Medea' Gets A Modern Twist

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST: A tale of love, betrayal and murder is playing out in the Malibu hills this month. The Greek tragedy "Medea" has been rewritten for the modern age and set in Southern California. It involves a difficult border crossing, an isolated garment worker, her straying husband and, of course, vengeance.

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This song body’s Medea and Jason’s relationship. 

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This song body’s Medea and Jason’s relationship. 

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Told from the perspective of the witch Circe, Medea visits her to be cleansed of her crimes.

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Thought this was interesting! And Gone Girl is one of my favorite movies

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Warning: "Gone Girl," "Medea" and "Eros" spoilers

Audiences have been flocking to see "Gone Girl." The film's box office is being bolstered by legions of fans loyal to the novel by Gillian Flynn. Cinephiles are reeled in by the name David Fincher in the directing slot. Anyone who likes dreamy Hollywood stars checks in for Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry. "Gone Girl" has everything going for it. This story of an extraordinarily dysfunctional and potentially violent marriage has captivated our popular culture.

It's time we ask ourselves why.

Viewers going into the theater without any prior knowledge of the book are expecting one of two things. First, and more likely Nick Dunne (Affleck) murdered his wife, Amy. Second, there's some kind of twist; Nick is innocent. The answer is much more blurry.

Midway through the film it's revealed that Nick has been carrying on a yearlong affair with a woman who's his student at the community college he teaches at. When Amy (Pike) discovers the affair she meticulously plans and fakes her own death in order to falsely incriminate her husband. The rest of the film sees Nick trying to clear his name and expose the crimes his wife has committed in framing him, including a murder. Nick is able to trick his wife into returning home and clearing his name by making her think he has apologized and repented. Amy then instigates another series of manipulations until she has, depending on your read of the film, either forced or made Nick want to stay with her. While the film's conclusion is less concrete, the novel makes it clear that Nick wants to stay with Amy--that he's fallen in love with Amy again.

While the story certainly has a devout following, it also has its share of naysayers. Many have claimed that "Gone Girl" is inherently misogynistic. Flynn has criticized these claims, but it's not hard to see their point. In some ways it's essentially the nagging wife scenario of a sitcom elevated to the level of life or death stakes. Amy's controlling, spiteful, calculating and does some very awful things.

What's at play here? Women made up 60 percent of "Gone Girl's" opening crowd. Are women really turning out en masse to see a woman-hating film written by a woman? The key to understanding the themes at work in one of this year's most buzzing cinema blockbusters has its origins thousands of years ago.

The year 431 BC saw the first production of ancient Greek playwright Euripides' tragedy "Medea." The play is essentially antiquity's "Gone Girl." It's even more disturbing. When the title character's lover abandons her and their children to exile in order to marry another woman, Medea does the unthinkable. Knowing that her own suicide wouldn't significantly pain her lover, she instead kills their two young children.

Many people's first instinct when considering Medea and Amy is to assign some kind of mental illness. Here, indeed, the whispers of misogyny return. Society often proliferates the stereotype of the crazy woman. Euripides doesn't permit this cop out. The play makes it clear that, desperate though she is, Medea isn't crazy. Nor is Medea an intrinsically evil character. She loves her children. She debates her decision and knowingly brings herself and her lover to ruin rather than allow her children to be cast into the hopeless destitution of exile. "Gone Girl's" Amy isn't crazy either. She's certainly manipulative, but very deliberately so. She's a wronged woman who makes the conscious decision to wrong in return.

Neither "Medea" nor "Gone Girl" allow audiences to fully condemn or discard their women. At the end of the play, Medea is carried away in a glorious supernatural chariot into the sky. It's made clear that in some way Medea has ascended the other characters. Similarly, once Amy fakes her death in "Gone Girl" there's never a point when Nick has control over her. She outsmarts Nick, the authorities, her parents and an old stalker who attempts to keep her captive. Like Medea, Amy rises above everyone else. These aren't misogynistic stories. At the conclusion of each, the women are empowered.

While we'll surely find difficulty understanding her circumstances and decision, the play makes it incredibly difficult to walk away without some sympathy for Medea. The same is true of Amy in "Gone Girl." Even after we're shown their terrifying capacities for darkness, we're never allowed to lose sight of the great injustices that have been dealt both to Medea and Amy. What's the source of our attraction to these characters? What's the source of Nick's attraction to Amy at "Gone Girl's" conclusion?

Euripides had a better vocabulary with which to explain these controversial characters. The ancient Greek "Medea" was written in, has a number of different words for love. For example, philia is the word for strong love between very good friends, family, or the practical love between couples who have long been married. The word used exclusively throughout the play between Medea and her lover, on the other hand, is eros. As English has only the one word, it can be difficult to explain eros. We derive erotic from it, though this is an oversimplification; eros encompasses much more than simply the physical. It's a loaded word. The closest English comes to it is passion.

In many ways we've been having a dialog about passion for as long as the existence of the English language. Many of the pillars of English literature deal with passion. Still today we're drawn to stories of passionate love. Even in our own lives most of us long for the kind of intimacy and excitement implied by the word passion. At the same time, as a culture we acknowledge that passion and love aren't the same thing. There are countless books, websites and therapists dedicated to restoring passion to people's relationships. What's the source of passion? Why does it so often fade?

Once again, looking at the stories we tell is a surefire way to get at the heart of our cultural beliefs. Historically, it isn't difficult to see the commonalities linking our fictional accounts of passion. Almost always, the unifying factor in our stories of passionate love is an element of danger or uncertainty. Lancelot and Guinevere. Romeo and Juliet. Heathcliff and Catherine. The names and the details are different, but we've always been telling stories of incredibly troubled love, the most tragic of which we use as our most iconic examples of passionate love.

Not all of our love stories end in tragedy. However, even more sedate versions of fictional love always have some kind of greater struggle to overcome before the lovers can be together. The question is--what happens after a romantic comedy? We like to believe in happily ever after, but a quick look at society quickly reveals how rare that story is. The heroes of our rom-coms become the dissatisfied married couples we all know.

Is passion a result of the uncertainty?

Passion is associated with the early years of relationships. In other words, it's associated with the period of time when there's something to lose. When a relationship is uncertain. As relationships age, however, constancy removes the risk and, often, with it the eros.

This taming of eros is the source of both Medea's and Amy's actions. While most at some point reconcile with the onset of philia's ascendancy over eros, Medea and Amy never leave room for it. Their relationships are grounded solely on eros, on passion.

Amy is characterized as incredibly competitive. Her parents write a series of children books based on a perfect version of her life entitled "Amazing Amy." Flawlessness in every aspect of her life, including love, has always been drilled into Amy and as a result she can't abide failure.

Enter Nick Dunne.

Throughout Nick's courtship of Amy he's in every way flawless. He manages to hit all the right notes, make all the right moves. Naturally, Amy fell in love with what appeared to be a reflection of her desire for perfection.

No, Nick didn't kill Amy. No, Nick isn't innocent.

Nick Dunne represents a fairly standard version of love in our culture. It's not flattering. Not long after he marries Amy, Nick gets lazy. He stops putting in the energy passion requires. Eventually, whether trying to recreate passion or just feel young again, Nick betrays Amy: he begins an affair. In other words, he couldn't be further from the version of himself, the perfection, Amy fell in love with.

When Amy learns the full extent of Nick's change and betrayal she become a modern Medea. She tears apart his life.

If the story ended like a typical crime show, if Amy was found out and incarcerated, I could possibly still be convinced it was misogynistic. As it is, however, I think something far more informed is happening here.

For Amy, anything less than passion is failure, anything less than eros is unacceptable. She's determined to reignite what was lost between her and Nick. She returns home and sells the story that she disappeared because her former stalker kidnapped her. Nick finds himself cleared of charges, but the public expects him to be overjoyed at his wife's return. If Nick leaves her he'll be vilified by the public for abandoning Amy.

Nick could take the hit to his reputation. He could leave. He knows Amy is capable of murder, yet he stays. He claims to stay to find a way to incriminate Amy, but as time passes it's clear his motives aren't so clear. Nick's narration in the novel makes it clear that he can't fully hate Amy for what she did to him. Amy rightly points out that Nick liked himself best when he was passionate about Amy, when he was trying to be his best to impress her. As for what Amy did, nobody but Amy knows him well enough to so carefully dismantle his life. Nobody else loves him passionately enough to devastate him so completely. After Amy, Nick knows he'll never be satisfied with ordinary love again. Amy's actions reinsert risk into their relationship, providing the conditions necessary to once again have eros.

There's no doubt Nick and Amy's relationship is unhealthy. Amy is controlling. Nick is disloyal and slothful. They carve their perfection out of absolute dysfunction. Their story is doubtlessly disturbing, but it also allures us. We're attracted to such relentless devotion to passion. Ultimately, though, Nick and Amy are a fantasy. A constantly explosive relationship of this magnitude isn't sustainable. What we, like Nick, have to ask ourselves is when we are our best selves: in the throes of eros or in the domesticity of philia? And in which are we our truest selves?
arts@dailynebraskan.com

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STEWART: 'Gone Girl' is a modern day 'Medea'

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Warning: "Gone Girl," "Medea" and "Eros" spoilers Audiences have been flocking to see "Gone Girl." The film's box office is being bolstered by legions of fans loyal to the novel by Gillian Flynn. Cinephiles are reeled in by the name David Fincher in the directing slot.

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Black Medea: Adaptations for Modern Plays

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Black Medea: Adaptations for Modern Plays

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Black Medea is a written collection of six plays, each of which portraying Medea as a woman of color. The adaptations side to side are meant to highlight African American culture and history.

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This speaks to me!

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Film adaptation by Lars von Trier (1988)

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Film adaptation by Lars von Trier (1988)

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"LA MEDEA re-imagines Euripides’ myth into a made-for-camera Latin-disco-pop feminist variety show. At once an immersive musical and a simulcast film, LA MEDEA is directed, performed, shot, and edited in real time. Declared "mythology's 'Nasty Woman'” by VICE, the pervasive figure of the dangerous immigrant woman who vengefully murders her own children is shattered in this genre-bending musical."