Complex mix of myth, modernity returns home
A power struggle is about to break out in the Pico-Union barrio of Los Angeles. Fresh from prison and trying to keep his nose clean, the new kid in the neighborhood finds temporary digs with another ex-con, who’s now running an elaborate scheme involving guns, drugs, loan sharking and more. When the newcomer falls for the crime boss’ sister, things get deep fast. Tales untold and pasts undiscovered lurk in the background, destined to ignite.
That’s the powerfully refractive lens playwright Luis Alfaro holds up to one of the signal Greek tragedies in “Oedipus el Rey,” which opened Friday, June 7, in a 10th anniversary “legacy” revival at Magic Theatre. This potent, multifaceted work, widely produced over the past decade, returns to the theater that premiered it.
As embodied by the muscular but still boyish Esteban Carmona, Oedipus is an innocent who doesn’t know his own strength or temperament, or the truth of his past — a dangerous and doomed combi
nation of forces roiling inside him. Jocasta (a magnetic Lorraine Velez), riddled with grief and rage after the death of her husband, parries and taunts Oedipus when they meet, but the tension soon takes on an erotic charge. Tearing off their clothes, they proceed to spend the next three months in bed.
Extremes of emotion and action are the essential fuel of Greek tragedy. Anyone who didn’t sleep through the requisite high school or college classes (or plenty of other means to pick up the story of Sophocles’ play) will know what’s coming in the Oedipal triangle of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother. It’s Freud 1A.
In Alfaro’s inspired appropriation, the gravitational weight of family, crime, incarceration and race sends this version driving headlong into the present. The eternal and the immediate occupy the same imaginatively compressed and energized space as the play unfolds. The confinements that surround these characters are both the actual ones of prison and class and the deeprooted ones of human experience.
“Oedipus el Rey” isn’t a contemporary setting of the ancient Greek text. Nor is it an issuedriven occasion to address the nature of the penal system, the politics of the border or some sociological response to cycles of violence. Rather it’s a dramatic and theatrical fusion of myth and modernity, formal rhetoric and Spanish-inflected street argot, a mystical feathered sphinx and offhanded mentions of Oprah and “All My Children.” Nothing is unconsidered, up to and including the invocation of Oprah, that branded media deity.
Consider, as an example of Alfaro’s inventive powers, his animating treatment of the Greek chorus. Appearing first (and finally) in orange prison jerseys, Sean San Jose, Juan Amador, Armando Rodriguez and Gendell Hing-Hernandez turn up as oracles clustered together in owl masks, barrio merchants of various healing services, and raucous celebrants at Oedipus and Jocasta’s wedding.
At times they speak in unison or almost musical cadences of call and response. They’re often puckishly funny and always nimbly responsive. When Jocasta gives birth, they huff along with her labored breathing. This chorus doesn’t merely comment on the action but forms a kind of collective, labile subconscious.
They also double in key supporting roles. San Jose stands out as Tiresias, the conflicted blind seer who first hides and finally reveals, with a lingering touch of self-justification, the fateful facts of Oedipus’ past. When he raises his blind man’s stick above his head, the impacted ferocity of the piece coheres in that foreboding, frozen image.
Director Loretta Greco’s bare-stage production is at once stark and expansive. The four structural pillars of the playing space seem to mark out the unyielding contours of the story, overlaid by beautifully articulate design. Hana Kim’s moody projections of distant rustling leaves or a procession of stylized human figures, WenLing Liao’s chiaroscuro lighting, and Jake Rodriquez’s subtle but decisive sound create a taut but expressive language synced to the text.
At an hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission, “Oedipus el Rey” has its slow and even static passages. The script turns discursively explanatory at several points. There’s some starchy acting. But the deficiencies are passing notes in the deep engagement of the evening.
Just when you think it’s ended, in the suffering and cauterizing violence of Oedipus’ and Jocasta’s final confrontation, Alfaro brings the chorus back on for a cheeky but ambiguously unsettling epilogue. “Let him be,” they say of the tragic hero. But as countless retellings of his story like this one prove, Oedipus never rests easy.