And then he beds Laius’s widow, Jocasta (Sandra Delgado).On Riccardo Hernandez’s set, adorned with a lurid mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mr. Alfaro riffs on his Greek source, but this play is a negative of the Sophocles original. The fight scenes, choreographed by The framing dialogue doesn’t help, as when Jocasta insists, “You’re a part of me.
Here’s another gun-packing gangbanger who lives la vida loca and then reaps its bloody rewards. When Laius (Juan Francisco Villa), a Los Angeles gangster, learns that his unborn son will kill him, he arranges to have the baby killed, slashing the bottoms of his feet for good measure. Play and staging gain in strength as the short evening proceed, though again, greater attention to the visuals could have amplified the horror in our hero’s climactic revelation of patricide and incest.
Stories are boring, some prisoners say; they’re depressing, they don’t change anything. Sometimes less is just less, as demonstrated by "Oedipus el Rey.
He’s crossed seas and centuries to appear in Luis Alfaro’s vigorous and pointed The play opens in a prison complex, as a convict chorus rushes around the stage in orange scrubs and tries to decide what story to tell.
Little does Oedipus realize her late husband is the man he had killed — or that she’s his own mother.Staged on a plain plywood floor rectangle with few props and no backdrop apart from lighting designer Sarah Sidman’s rows of headlights, “Rey” makes a strained first impression. We tell them, in part, so that we don’t have to voice less comfortable truths — that the circumstances of a person’s birth often prophesy the life that follows.That’s uniquely true of Oedipus, the limping princeling fated to kill his father and marry his mother. For lack of other significant input, primary design impacts are made by Sidman’s lighting (though it’s held in check for too long) and Jake Rodriguez’s busy sound design. When Oedipus repeatedly dashes back and forth in the smallish playspace, it signifies nothing beyond workshop actor business.But the writing (which mixes English and scattered Spanish phrases) is both lush and sharp in dialogue scenes, particularly those between unknowingly against-nature lovers Oedipus and Jocasta.
Torrez and Dias gamely endure a long sequence of naked entanglings. Out on the streets for the first time as a full-grown man, he gets into a road-rage argument and kills a man en route to Los Angeles.
And so it goes here.
More than that, he makes it resonate with a passion fully enhanced not only by the spare poetry of his text but also by Greco's intense staging and the naked vulnerability of two fully committed actors in the show that opened Wednesday." Oedipus el Rey Sometimes less is just less, as demonstrated by "Oedipus el Rey." “I don’t want him chasing me in the afterlife,” Laius says.A rescued Oedipus (Juan Castano), nicknamed “Patas Malas,” or the not-so-macho “Bad Legs,” grows up unmoored. As a Chicano orphan reared by the foster and prison systems, that is his fate.But if Mr. Alfaro’s play ends much as it begins, with the same orange-clad chorus repeating many of the same lines, it challenges us to learn from Oedipus’s tale.“Can we live the story not yet told, and the possibility not yet imagined?” the chorus asks. With his unique Chicano swagger and sly sense of humor, Luis Alfaro transforms Sophocles’ ancient tale into …
Mr. Castano is at center in front of it.
In the prison yard Oedipus can claim, “Names don’t define me. Oedipus el Rey (Extended January 28 - March 14).
Do you believe in destiny? In America, there are stories we like to tell. I don’t know why,” a line that had the audience giggling.