Word: etain
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Playwright Karen Malpede intended the work to be a celebration of womanhood and woman's fertility. At a crucial and trying moment early in the play Macha states, "Bind me to life." Both she and her daughter Etain (Courtney Williams) see themselves as bound to life, and the phrase as their emblem...
...even death is not to be feared, the female characters would have you believe, because it too is part of the life cycle. Etain asks, while standing over the bones of the deceased woman whose name she bears, "What have I to fear if this is what you have become?" Death is a return to mother earth, and both Etain and Macha glorify the mother. Macha celebrates the regenerative process of birth when she says, "There is no love like the love I bear for Etain." She and her daughter, the only truly successful female characters, are exemplars of binding...
...child, Conor (played by Brad West at age 12 and Arthur Wu at 16), survives and serves as the sole decent representative for the more barbaric sex. But his goodness seems to come from his mother and the influence of a chance meeting with the young Etain (Sian Heder), who is the namesake of Conor's mother. The extent to which the more developed Conor can be viewed positively is the extent to which he takes on more feminine characteristics...
...most evil male characters do, this is due to his priestly duties and possibly to his homosexuality. As a representative of Christianity, he influences, through religion, the two women in the work who most fail to live to the potential of their own womanhood. The first, the elder Etain (Patty Goldman), Conor's mother, dies in child birth seemingly because she is afraid of it. The other, Elen (Jennifer Harris), Angus' molested daughter, turns from her incestuousness to chastity...
Until the very end of the play, the men of Monster are devoid of the humanity, which the women like Macha and her child Etain embody. The final resolution, where Lord Owain comes to lay down his weapons and his machismo, is problematic. His character has not been properly prepared for the metamorphosis. His chastity after his wife's death and his late embrace of a more empathetic way of life cannot be convincing, because, throughout the work, his character has been flat and static. Even if we did believe the change, we would know it was not entirely autonomously...