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Reclining high in the Getty Villa's outdoor theater, waiting for the actors below to begin rehearsing his latest drama, Luis Alfaro looked nothing like an artist wrestling with tragic mysteries.
He was more like a giant panda -- large, round and relaxed, sporting a wrinkled, bright white shirt and a trilby hat, greeting the world with a naturally gentle and welcoming mien.
"I'm pretty much a softy," Alfaro, a veteran leader among Los Angeles playwrights, had confessed a few minutes earlier.
But over the past 11 years, Alfaro persistently has plunged into some of the most primordially disturbing crannies of Western culture by adapting a series of ancient Greek tragedies. Their purpose, Aristotle tells us, is to instill "pity and terror" in the audience, who'll feel cathartic relief at having tunneled through darkness and come out the other side.
Alfaro began with "Electricidad" in 2004. He transferred Euripides' tale of vengeful slaughter in the family of the legendary King Agamemnon to the household of a contemporary Latino drug boss in the Southern California desert. In 2010 came "Oedipus el Rey," in which Sophocles' born-to-lose hero morphed into a charismatic Mexican American fated to a life of recidivist crime and imprisonment.
Now, at 53, Alfaro is tackling "Medea." In the 2,446-year-old play by Euripides, the deepest, most blindly self-sacrificing kind of spousal devotion turns into a horrifying torrent of vengeful rage.
"Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles" spares none of the original's horror and, if anything, deepens it with a nightmarish depiction of the clandestine journeys today's immigrants may attempt to get to the United States.
Like Euripides' uncanny protagonist, Alfaro's Medea lives in near isolation. She clings to rural values and folkways from her home in the Mexican state of Michoacan while her husband, Hason (Alfaro's spelling), looks only forward. Bedazzled by the chance to seize the good life in Boyle Heights, Hason assimilates quickly as he seeks the right connections and sacrifices home life on the altar of career. He tells Medea it's all for her and for their son.
Alfaro says he was drawn to the story not by its horrible outcome but by the intensity of the ill-fated love between Jason and Medea, who cross borders together in Euripides' version as well...