MACHA is a one-act musical with book and lyrics by Maria Elizabeth White and music and lyrics by Anna Marcus- Hecht, written for their NYU Graduate Musical Theater Writing thesis project. The show follows the healing journey of Macha, the Irish goddess of female revenge, loosely adapted from a 1st century Irish epic called The Táin. The story begins when Macha is accidentally summoned by a woman, Tiff, who is being physically abused by her husband, Mike. Tiff claims she doesn’t need any help, and fights Macha on her offer to enact revenge against Mike. Convinced that she knows best, Macha drags Tiff along as she helps other women through acts of revenge, namely a young woman, Alaina, stuck with an unwanted pregnancy and a boyfriend who won’t take responsibility for his child.
Throughout the show, it is revealed that Macha was once a fertility goddess, who fell in love with a mortal man, Crunniuc. In an attempt to impress the king of Ulster, Crunniuc coerced Macha into running races against the king’s horses while she was heavily pregnant. Macha won the races, but miscarried her child, and in her grief, morphed into a goddess of revenge, cursing Crunniuc and the men of Ulster to feel the pains of pregnancy. As Macha opens up about her past and begins to process the guilt she’s been holding on to for so many years, she comes to the conclusion that blind revenge won’t help women in the long run, and that she needs to focus on helping women rather than hurting men.
Composer and co-lyricist for MACHA
Check out her youtube channel @articulatelyComposed for music from MACHA and more!
The song "A Taste of Revenge" has been featured at Feinstein's 54 Below in the Works in Progress series, performed by Sojourner Brown and Tatiana Wechsler.
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Watch the MACHA sizzle reel, created at NYU as part of our thesis project!
Everlasting Cradle is one of my personal favorite moments in MACHA!
Funds will be used to pay our director, actors, and musicians and to reserve rehearsal space for our next staged reading - anything helps!
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