“Oedipus El Rey”

Luis Alfaro

Ten years ago, Magic Theatre staged the world premiere of Luis Alfaro’s gripping, disturbing, and bone-chilling Oedipus El Rey – a modern retelling of Sophicles’ Oedipus Rex where these questions of what is destined and what is possible to change are posed.  Ten years later, the Magic revives the play that has since seen over twenty productions across the country; but since the initial run, Black Lives Matter, headlines about over-crowded prisons disproportionately filled with brown and black men, and a president who spouts almost daily disparaging remarks about non-white people now make these questions more relevant and more immediate than ever.  If a Latino man, for example, declares as does Luis Alfaro’s modern day Oedipus, “I want to write my own story,” how possible is it – especially if he has already spent much of his young life in prison for a mistake he made as a naïve youth?  If upon being freed he exudes new-found confidence, wants to assert his own kind of leadership among peers, and plans to use the knowledge he has gained from much study to lead a new life, will the society around him see him for who he really now is or only see him how that same society believes he has been fated by his heritage, ethnicity, and color to become? 

In a revised production that is as much if not even more arrestingly heart-pounding, emotionally moving, and profoundly thought-provoking than was the world premiere, Magic Theatre stages once again a Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro and directed by Loretta Greco that is a must-see where these and many more questions are posed and begging us to consider and address them head-on.

Luis Alfaro takes Sophicles’ storyline and brings it into the twenty-first century, retaining elements of mythical nature like prophecies from local oracles and a confrontation with the dreaded Sphinx.   Like in ancient Greek plays, ever-present is also a Chorus – in this case, a Chicano Coro of four men –narrate in over-lapping sentences of both Spanish and English while also making comments among themselves and stepping into a variety of roles to further the story’s telling.  The Coro are prisoners at a California State Prison in North Kern – all clad in orange – who have helped raise the boy, Oedipus, and who line up to tell us the story of a man they variously describe as one “living in prison, raised in the yard” and “feared by many” who also “wants to be something more,” “[is] with no limits,” “[is] destined to be.”  

One Coro steps forward to become the local gangster-leader and his father, Laius, who hears a prediction that the baby in his wife’s pregnant body will one day grow up to kill him.  Laius instructs his loyal friend, Tiresias, to kill the baby boy after his wife, Jocasta, has given birth.  Tiresias cannot do so and instead raises the adoring boy as his own son, even behind the walls of a prison where they both reside for separate crimes of robberies.  Oedipus truly believes that the old man, now blind, is his father, with whom he has spent much sacred time in the prison’s library.  He emerges at the time of his release as a self-assured – bordering on cocky – young man, resolute to create his own path in the world but unaware that he has been born into a community and a heritage where the odds are totally stacked against him of succeeding.

Physically, Esteban Carmona’s Oedipus immediately gives the impression of being admirably non-stoppable in his determination, repeatedly demonstrating what seem impossible exercises of incredibly fast and furious push-ups, high jumps, and squats.  His taut and muscular physique, his quick smirk of a smile, and his overall sure nature displayed in walk and posture shout of his eager readiness to take on the world. 

A dream where a multi-headed owl (the four Coros) predicts that Oedipus is accursed and that he will kill his father – who he is sure is Tiresias – is quickly rejected by Oedipus as ridiculous.  However, when leaving prison in a car the gentle, caring Tiresias (Sean San José, also a Coro) has provided for him, he becomes involved in a road rage incident where his own quickness to anger mirrors the equally hot-headed man in the other car, whose pulled knife leads to Oedipus killing him.  Only we know at this time that Oedipus has fulfilled the prediction of murdering his real father, Laius (an impulsive, wily, and callous Gendell Hing-Hernandez, also a Coro).

Oedipus lands in the home of a friend and current ‘king’ of his Latino neighborhood, Creon (a fierce, wiry, and soon suspicious Armando Rodrigues, playing also a Coro), who lives with his beautiful, sister, Jocasta (Lorriane Velez).  An agreed one-week’s stay by Oedipus extends into extra weeks and then to the marriage altar as he and Jocasta soon become passionately attracted, with the two actors engaged in a scene of bare, mutual passion and love-making that is as poetically sensuous as any I have ever seen on the live stage.  The powerful magnetism between the two is visceral, with neither realizing that part of that natural pull is because Jocasta is the mother Oedipus never knew.

As Oedipus asserts not only his manhood with the woman he loves but also his desire for leadership in challenging her brother’s old-guard way of doing things, fate begins to slip its pre-determined hand of cards into his life in ways he will not be able fully to control.  Esteban Carmona and Lorraine Velez’s performances are electrifying and heart-breaking as the events unfold with a fury that speaks of the violence that seems by unalterable definition to surround their lives and their fates. 

Loretta Greco’s direction of the ninety minutes never lets us forget the ancient play’s origins while all the time hitting us with the firm realities of today’s world in the cells and streets where these Latino men live out their lives.  The projections of Hana Kim combine incredibly beautifully shadowed scenes of trees and stars along with splashed patterns of murals and stark patterns that bring the more harsh worlds to full life.  Wen-Ling Liao’s lighting sends us somewhere into and between a dream world of ancient storytelling and a cold, stark world of a reality difficult to face and understand.  Jake Rodriguez’s sound design jars us with the clang of metal, prison doors that lock men in like animals while also reminding us and them that somewhere nearby a highway of rushing cars continue to pass by in everyday lives of freedom.  Jacqueline Scott’s designed tattoos and Dave Maier’s directed fight instruction bring realities further to bear in the intimate, Magic setting, reminding us that what we are seeing is much more an American reality than just an ancient tale of Greekdom.

If in ten years, Magic Theatre chooses to revise yet a third time this powerful play that will surely continue to reside firmly in each audience member’s memory as did the original of 2009 reside in mine, we can only hope that its timely relevance will be much less to the world of 2029 than it is to that of 2019.  That will perhaps depend on how much our current society responds to a Coro’s final, haunting messages:

Rating: 5 E, “Must-See”

Oedipus El Reycontinues through June 23, 2019 at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco.  Tickets are available online at http://magictheatre.org/ or by calling the box office at (415) 441-8822.