Moral Event Horizon/Theatre




 * The titular character in Macbeth (the play for which the page image is an illustration) reaches this point when
 * Medea. She convinces two kids to cut up their father and put the pieces in boiling water, making them think it'll make him younger. And that's even before the scene when she puts the children she had by Jason to the sword.
 * She crossed it even before they got back to Argos when she chopped up her younger brother and tossed the pieces into the ocean so that her father would have to delay his pursuit to gather the pieces for a proper burial. This was so awful that Jason's intervention was the only thing keeping the rest of the Argonauts from tossing her overboard too.
 * Though that only happens in the myth. In the play her Moral Event Horizon is stabbing her two children purely because it will hurt Jason. This is after she kills his wife by lighting her on fire with magic poison. Oh, and then she sails off to Athens under the aegis of the king.
 * It should probably be noted, though, that most of these (aside from murdering her brother) weren't included in the story until Euripides introduced the idea that she murdered her children. Up until that point, she was more of a deeply flawed Woobie Destroyer of Worlds, since Jason was kind of a bastard to her.
 * In Bat Boy: The Musical, Dr. Parker is a pretty sympathetic character until he murders a kid in order to frame the title character. After that, he's more of a monster than Bat Boy ever was.
 * Regina in The Little Foxes is greedy and morally bankrupt as it is, but she crosses the event horizon when she lets her husband Horace die of a heart attack because he won't go along with her scheme.
 * Similarly, Richard III probably hit it when he had the princes drowned.
 * Caldwell B. Cladwell crosses this when he orders Bobby Strong to be sent to Urinetown,  knowing full well that his daughter will probably be killed by the rebels. Necessarily Evil or not, that was just unpardonable
 * of All My Sons has to qualify for this in some measure, though Your Mileage May Vary.
 * To put it in perspective: yeah, people might have been shopping faulty parts to the military in World War II for the contract money, but . Not only this but , and   has no problem with letting everyone believe   And he allows this to go on for years. Then when the truth comes out, he's not very remorseful about it and tries to justify his actions and get out of it as being "for the family" and that lots of others were doing it at the time, so if   was going to turn him to the police he might as well turn over everyone else who did it. Then, when it's revealed that his actions  , he goes into the house as if to get his coat so he can be taken into the police to atone for what he did....
 * The eponymous man in Phantom of the Opera crosses the MEH when he  Lampshaded in Christine's song lyrics: "The tears I might have shed for your dark fate, grow cold and turn to tears of hate!" Though she still pities him by the end anyway, so maybe this doesn't qualify.
 * Greek tragedy has a term for this event: Harmatia. It's the act the Tragic Hero performs, usually motivated by his "hubris" (Tragic Flaw), that starts the tragedy down the path of no return. Normally this is some kind of offense against the gods or against the natural order: a murder, an act of blasphemy, a rashly-taken oath, etc. But once committed, it can't be undone. The Tragic Hero and every character around him is doomed, no matter how hard they try to escape their fate.
 * Seneca's play Thyestes is about King Atreus' Moral Event Horizon. Mad at his brother, the title character, for stealing his wife and attempting to steal the throne, he pretends to call Thyestes and sons back from exile and serves Thyestes his own sons for dinner and takes great pleasure in telling him "you ate your children".
 * Stanley's crossing of this in A Streetcar Named Desire came when he.
 * In Wicked, at least as far as Elphaba was concerned, the Wizard crossed the horizon when he broke Professor Dillamond's will, turning him from a respected professor into a mindless animal. For Mrs. Morrible, the horizon mark came when she created the cyclone that brought Dorothy to Oz(and killed Elphaba's sister Nessarosa). Interestingly enough, once Glinda takes the reins of government, she is willing to simply exile the Wizard from Oz, but has Morrible sent to prison.