Luis Alfaro isn't the first playwright to apply an ancient Greek template to a modern American story. Nor will he be the last to end up with an uneven play on his hands as a result. In Oedipus el Rey, now making its world premiere at the Magic Theatre, Alfaro takes the raw materials of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and transposes them into the story of a Latino ex-con living in a Los Angeles barrio. The outcome isn't exactly what the Greeks would call tragic.
Jennifer Reiley
Jocasta (Romi Dias) and Oedipus (Joshua Torrez): Creepy, but sorta hot.
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The Magic Theatre, Fort Mason (Marina and Buchanan), Building D, S.F
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The Greeks were, after all, very picky about what constituted a genuine tragedy. It was a genre fit for a king, since a tragic end was thought to resonate most powerfully if it included a fall from greatness. Sophocles' plays in particular observed what Aristotle would later call the unities of time, place, and action: Oedipus Rex, for instance, takes place over the course of a single day, in a single location, with no extraneous subplots. When we first meet the hero, he has already killed his father and slept with his mother; the drama lies in revealing what he has inadvertently done. When deaths do happen, they occur offstage. And every time the plot takes another dramatic step forward, a masked Chorus enters to reflect on the cosmic meaning of it all.
The disadvantage of this approach is that, in the wrong hands, it can feel static and secondhand, with a parade of minor characters describing the deaths of major characters in overlong speeches. (An officious devotion to classical models is exactly why 18th-century tragedy is for the most part unwatchable.) But in a well-constructed play like Oedipus Rex or Antigone, the streamlining of events is not only elegant but also propulsive — the action of the play is so purposeful, and so inevitable, that by the end of a good production the audience members should feel almost as if they've been dragged onto the stage to share the characters' fates.
I'm not saying that Sophocles' story can't adapt to a less rigid narrative structure. I'm just saying that if you change the structure, you'd better find a way to create and maintain a comparable sense of mounting doom. On that score, Alfaro's adaptation simply doesn't work. As paradoxical as this may sound, the show is at once too removed from the original and not removed enough. By loosening up the narrative and showing us more backstory, he sacrifices most of the tension and dread Sophocles creates. And by forcing a number of parallels between ancient Greece and modern-day L.A., Alfaro creates a hybrid of the two cultures that feels less inspired than arbitrary.
That doesn't mean Alfaro never hits the mark. The seduction of Jocasta (Romi Dias) by Oedipus (Joshua Torrez) — a scene Sophocles discreetly left to our imaginations — is as sexy and tender as unwitting incest probably can be. The enamored son, a virgin, slowly unstraps his mother's gown, then drops his boxers before kneeling down to bury his face in her breasts. "Teach me," he pleads. It's a genuinely moving moment despite the mild creep factor, and Alfaro craftily uses it to reveal how Oedipus helps Jocasta recover from the grief of losing her baby boy so many years before.
The death of Laius (Eric Avilés) is, by contrast, far less affecting. In Sophocles' version, we're told that Oedipus met and killed a stranger at a crossroads, who turns out to be his father. It's a good example of how the Greek approach to tragic storytelling, which tends to introduce a gap of time or space between action and reflection, helps gloss over the fact that the action itself is sometimes improbable. When we see Laius' death as part of a full-blown scene in Oedipus el Rey, it comes out of nowhere and resonates hardly at all. Some things are simply better told than shown.
Each member of the four-man Chorus — often dressed in prison jumpsuits — plays multiple roles throughout the show, and there's no weak link among them. Dias has some powerful moments, especially opposite Torrez. But it's Torrez in particular who stands out in this production. A relative newbie, he brilliantly swaggers his way through the show, delivering Alfaro's lingo-heavy dialogue with authority. Some will swoon over his cheekbones, others over his abs, but it was his eyes that drew me in: There's a quickness and vividness about them that I found irresistible.
By play's end, of course, those eyes become bleeding sockets. (Significantly, Alfaro doesn't make Oedipus do the gouging himself — Jocasta does it for him.) It's in these final moments that, for me, Oedipus el Rey fails to register as a particularly effective tragedy. In Sophocles' version, the climax feels driven by tragic necessity; here, it's driven by nothing more specific than an apparent need to dovetail with the original.
"Our story's already been told," Jocasta says to Oedipus at one point. "We're fated." I take that to mean that the fates of these characters aren't driven by any logic within Oedipus el Rey, but by the logic of a play written some 2,400 years ago. We get a lot of backstory, but almost no sense of the incremental revelations leading Oedipus to his moment of truth. It's a case of too much Oedipal past, and not nearly enough Oedipal present.
