Review of Mojada, A Medea in Los Angeles, Yale Repertory Theatre
The impressive housefront onstage recalls both a temple and a mausoleum (Marcelo Martínez García, set design). The action of the play takes place before it as though in a symbolic space where what will be manifest is the tragedy of a people who do not belong anywhere, least of all in that house owned by the play’s nemesis. Indeed, the tableaux that open and close Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery at Yale Repertory Theatre, are two of the most powerful moments in the play.
Tita (Alma Martinez) in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)
At the start, we witness Tita (Alma Martinez), an aged woman, handling two giant feathers. When clapped together, they conjure up sounds of the past, giving us a quick aural history of the storied family we’re about to meet; and at the close, a vision of a bird—the guaco, with whom Medea (Camila Moreno) has been strongly identified—rises above the house like an avenging angel. Those paired moments provide compelling theatrics to a production—adapted from the tragedy by Euripides that dramatizes the ancient Greek myth of Medea and Jason—that too often suffers from static presentation and stereotyped characters in this contemporary tale of immigrant tragedy in a scrappy barrio of Los Angeles.
Medea (Camila Moreno) in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)
Playwright Luis Alfaro lulls us into what might seem a comic fable of a family of newcomers from Zamora, Mexico—Medea, her husband Hason (Alejandro Hernández), their son Acan (Romar Fernandez) and the family servant Tita—gradually adapting with both sorrows and joys to the new world in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles (some 1120 miles north) where they now live. The happy family segments show us how eager Hason is to assimilate—urging his son to wear U.S. soccer colors rather than Mexico’s—and how ambitiously he tries to please his female boss, Armida (Mónica Sánchez), a big mover in local real estate who owns the house they rent. On the more traditional side—or “tribal,” as a neighbor Josefina, or “Josey,” (Nancy Rodríguez) likes to say—we hear of Medea’s great skills as a seamstress and, in addition to a folkloric tale in which Hason first met her while seeking the guaco she was imitating, Medea is also identified with Mexico itself. We learn she’s too fearful to leave the house even for a daytrip to the pier. Only gradually do we hear not only the story of the family’s harrowing journey to the US but of the conditions that precipitated the family’s flight.
The cast of the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)
Which is a way of saying there’s a lot of backstory here. Much of the past is recounted in hypnotic speeches that reference acts of violence and outrage that seem to intrude from a different play. The disjuncture comes from trying to wed the character of Medea, as received from Euripides, with Camila Moreno’s much more benign and afflicted character in Alfaro’s play. Here we feel that Medea is meant to be the sympathetic heroine of the play, so that her eventual vengeance has moral force. Maybe in myth, but in realistic terms—and the play likes its naturalism—the harms Medea suffers from her husband, while vexing, are not exactly the stuff of Greek drama. The suspension of disbelief is not so easily afforded.
The Medea of Euripides is a wronged woman from another city, transplanted by her husband, whom she has helped with sorcery, and now abandoned by him (the fate of their children is still being decided as the play takes place). She has her griefs and is willing to transform herself into an implacable Fury to achieve her revenge. Alfaro doesn’t give his Medea the space to enact such a transformation. One minute she’s listening to the fulsome blandishments of the tiresomely buoyant Josefina while making her a dress to inspire passion in a dull husband, and the next she’s sewing a witchy gown to destroy Armida, Hason’s soon-to-be new US bride (Medea and Hason were never actually married, apparently).
Hason (Alejandro Hernandez), Medea (Camila Moreno), Armida (Monica Sanchez) in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)
There’s a sense that Alfaro wants characters like Josefina and Armida to play as broad caricatures, but, if so, their part in the story works against outright comedy. An evil queen in a Disney movie Armida may be and her fate may be received as one of those magic realism moments that are so popular, but, even so, such touches make us wonder whose story Mojada is trying to dramatize. Medea’s act has to do, vaguely, with a blow against patriarchy. How better to undermine Hason’s machismo then attacking him through his progeny (a word that finds a joking relevance from one of Josefina’s stories)? Or might we say that Acan’s fate was sealed the minute he changed his team colors?
Acan (Romar Fernandez) in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)
In the Rep production, the play’s best feature—besides that opening and close—is Alma Martinez’s Tita. She has to be both Greek chorus and Mexican housekeeper, as well as a figure who seems, like a bit of a Tiresias, to see what it all might amount to in some big book of myth. She’s a wonderful grounding presence throughout, full of reactions, and even the tendency to make her a figure of stereotypical peasant grit is worn with a requisite irony, as in her great speech about “smiling, though I hate you.”
About hubris the ancient Greeks were never wrong. The missteps of humanity could always be put into perspective by a tragic fate, a decree of the gods. Adapting the Greeks’ fatalistic outlook to contemporary settings commonly presents a tempting challenge for contemporary playwrights, though such attempts at times may seem acts of hubris in themselves.
Mojada, A Medea in Los Angeles
By Luis Alfaro
Directed by Laurie Woolery
Scenic Designer: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Designer: Kitty Cassetti; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Projection Designer: Shawn Lovell-Boyle; Sound Designer: Bryn Scharenberg; Wig Designer: Krystal Balleza/Wig Associates; Production Dramaturgs: Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas, Nicholas Orvis; Technical Director: Andrew Riedermann; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Aisling Galvin
Cast: Romar Fernandez, Alejandro Hernández, Alma Martinez, Camilla Moreno, Nancy Rodriguez, Mónica Sánchez
Yale Repertory Theatre
March 10-April 1, 2023