I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

How many times have those words been uttered? How many times have those words been uttered by women who were betrayed by the men they loved? How many times have these words haunted women who were so trapped by their sacrifices that they did not know how to break free?

MaMa mOsAic is an ensemble group of three women: Shá Cage, Signe Harriday and Jeany Park. Their works explore issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity and society. Their current piece, Making Medea, explores the mindset of women who feel trapped by marriage, family, and personal sacrifices––in a word, their lives.

The stage has a window suspended on stage left. On stage right is a screen that at times displays pictures. The rest of the stage is open, used for movement and choreography. Making Medea is made up of small vignettes that tell different stories.

Cage, Harriday and Park use movement, song and word to paint pictures of different women who are all desperately stuck in bad situations––women who sacrifice their families, educations, futures to start a family for love, women who stay with men because the men are the only ones they have ever known, women whose husbands sleep with other women. It also explores a number of moral issues raised by infanticide––not just why women are pushed to do it, but how they are to be judged for such an act.

Some pieces use repetitive movement to symbolize actions. In a scene where Harriday plays a mother bathing her children, Cage and Park repeat a drowning motion with their arms as they whisper to her "He's unclean, just do it."

For some of the pieces, Cage, Harriday and Park play characters of different races. In one sketch, Harriday and Park repeat the same dialogue over and over; the first time, they are both speaking in an African-American dialect. In the next, one speaks with a prototypically "Asian" dialect and the other with a more "white" dialect. In the third, one speaks in a white dialect and the other in a Latina dialect. Each time the dialogue is repeated, one catches different parts of the argument, which highlights what cultural codes affect our understanding of an argument.

Sometimes, the cast conveys their themes through song. One story starts off with the lyrics, "Ooh, child. Things are going to get easier." Cage plays a child who is out playing when his mother calls him in and stabs him because she thinks it will be better for him in the end.

Other vignettes are more realistic: Cage, Harriday and Park discuss outright the controversial issue of mothers who suffer from post partum psychosis. The scene is ripe with tough questions: Are these mothers sick? Why didn't anyone see this coming? Why didn't they get help? Can we judge them? Who should judge them? If it were a man, would things be different? When Susan says that a black man took her children, why did we believe her? Because she's white?

While Making Medea mostly explores how women are pushed to commit desperate acts, MaMa mOsAic (thankfully) does not attempt to justify the killing of children. The last scene, Tummy, explores the haunting thoughts of a young child who is locked in a basement with his brothers. Harriday lies in the middle of the stage, wrapped in gauzy fabric, talking to his mother: "Mommy, when you coming for us? I love you."

Making Medea points out that making decisions is never easy. Judging someone for his or her decisions shouldn't be either.