![]() ![]() Infuriated by his loss of power, he beats and rapes her. ![]() Overcome with her old feelings for him, she seduces him. Her religious observances completed, Midi confronts Jaz. He has brought Claire’s old nurse along to help him take the children, whom he plans to send away to another island. Meanwhile Jaz enters with a suitcase to collect his belongings…as well as some of hers. She goes to the corner of the room where she has set up an altar to her gods, prays, and performs a ritual. In Act II, set in Midi’s ancestral house the next morning, she awakens in total devastation and confusion. Claire takes charge, causing an exchange that comes near violence, ultimately leaving Midi in misery. Drunk, he lacks the courage, tells Midi familiar lies, and embraces her. Midi sings a song about how, as a young adolescent, she embraced her divine nature and her attendant powers, which includes reading the truth when people lie. Jaz appears in the street outside with his new lover, Claire, the Governor’s daughter, whom he has promised to marry. In a prelude, Midi dances with her familiar spirits, leading into Act I, set in the hotel bar, Midi sings about herself as a Sun-creature, the rain, and Jaz. She could destroy him with her magic, but, loving him, she is helpless. She lives with a dubious American “businessman,” Jaz, who is unfaithful and physically abusive. She is also a sorceress, a descendant of the Sun himself, loved and feared on the island. Midi (Medea) is a native singer in the bar of a hotel/brothel in a city in the French West Indies, c. ![]()
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