Unfortunately, Purgatorio is a talky, talky, talky play, with too much anger and too much anguish. So, the idea of the treacherous Jason and the murderous Medea once again coming face to face in Purgatorio, where they will rehash their sins against each other and take turns playing prosecutor and defendant, is intriguing. It is hard to imagine more horrifying crimes than Medea’s or a bigger cad than Jason. When Jason callously deserted his foreign bride to marry a younger woman from his own country, Medea murdered Jason’s new bride, put her two sons by Jason to the knife, and fled Corinth in a cloud of smoke. (Some say Medea slowed her father’s ferocious pursuit of the “Argo” by kidnapping and killing a younger brother, cutting up his body, and throwing it piece by piece into the sea for her grieving father to stop and retrieve bit by bit.)Īccording to legend, Jason and Medea married and had two sons but they did not live happily ever after. While pursuing the Golden Fleece, the leader of the Argonauts seduced the powerful sorceress, who betrayed her father, King Aeetes of Colchis, and used her magic powers to help Jason steal the magic fleece and make his escape. Once lovers and later man and wife, Jason and Medea ultimately committed unspeakable, well neigh unforgivable sins against each other. In Purgatorio, Dorfman takes the profoundly pagan characters of Jason and Medea from the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts renames them Man (Tom Hewitt) and Woman (Priscilla Lopez) outfits them in modern dress (by costume supervisor Kay Webb) and places them in their own special corner of Purgatory, which (in Roman Catholic doctrine) is a place where sinners who have died in a state of grace, but without expiating their sins, must be purified from sin before they may enter Heaven. This not-ready-for-prime-time work-in-progress by the author of Death and the Maiden (1992) once again focuses on revenge and how even righteous retribution corrodes and corrupts the soul of the person seeking vengeance. Last weekend, Theater Previews at Duke, in association with Producers Four, presented a workshop production of Purgatorio, a two-character tragedy by Chilean writer and human-rights activist Ariel Dorfman, who teaches at Duke University.