Medea

Medea is the first production of Beyn Theater Group, staged in 2011. It is an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, decontextualized from its Greek tragic setting and recontextualized within Iranian culture, drawing on Kurdish lullabies and ancient Zar ceremonies to imagine the tragic status of Iranian subjects.

What does it mean to carry the weight of an ancient grief in a modern body? Medea is the first production of Beyn Theatre Group — the project where the group's path began. Taking Euripides' tragedy as a starting point, the performance does not simply retell the story of a woman destroyed by betrayal and exile. Instead, it asks what happens when that story meets a group of Iranian performers, each carrying within them a cultural heritage full of songs, ceremonies, and unspoken loss.
At the heart of this work is a double movement: decontextualizing Medea from its Greek tragic origins and recontextualizing it through the lived experience of Iranian subjects. The performance weaves together the dramatic possibilities of the text with the heritage of marginalized subcultures — Kurdish lullabies, ancient Zar ceremonies, and the first, wordless sounds of human presence. Here, musicality is not ornament; it is the primary language through which bodies connect, histories surface, and a collective "we" becomes possible on stage.
With musicality, otherness, and stage dynamics as its founding axes, Medea understands performance as an encounter — not between actors and spectators, but between living bodies and minds. The stage becomes a space where ancient beliefs are reawakened in modern flesh, where personal and collective grief are held together, and where theatre becomes, above all, an invitation: to see one another, to remember, and to imagine.

Cast and Crew:
Director: Shahab Agahi
Music Designer: Navid Gohari
Dramaturgy: Mehdi Etemad Saeed
Performers: Sara Akbari, Nahal Farjadi, Mehdi Etemad Saeed, Amir Afshar Karaji, Arash Fattahi, Tahere Hazave, Mohammad Majd Taheri