Oedipus el Rey (Extended January 28 - March 14). In the prison yard Oedipus can claim, “Names don’t define me. Same old, same old. Stories about meritocracy and opportunity, about talent, hope and help. 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. 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. 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. But the soft-hearted would-be assassin instead fled with the infant, despite being struck blind by the gods for his betrayal.In Alfaro’s version Oedipus grows up a revolving-door habitue of juvenile, then adult corrective facilities. As is, Torrez’s hithero potently arrogant, fate-tempting (“I’m more powerful than God”) Oedipus speeds through his collapse and punitive self- mutilation.Among other thesps — all cast in multiple roles — Dias makes the most of Jocasta’s unexpected reawakening of passion, while Rodriguez is touching as her equally concerned and jealous brother. Oedipus el Rey Sometimes less is just less, as demonstrated by "Oedipus el Rey." I hope so.Review: A Timely Take on ‘Oedipus’ by Way of South Central Los AngelesSandra Delgado, left, is Jocasta and Juan Castano, her son, the title character in “Oedipus El Rey.”Riccardo Hernandez’s set features an oversize mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The incantatory chants of a four-man chorus (Pinate, Aviles, Rodriguez, CarlosAguirre) are Alfaro’s most pretentious passages, at least until they develop some humor later on. a reimagined classic by Luis Alfaro directed by Loretta Greco. I don’t know why,” a line that had the audience giggling. But Mr. Alfaro’s version is both a reiteration of a classic tale and an invitation to flip the script. 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. With his unique Chicano swagger and sly sense of humor, Luis Alfaro transforms Sophocles’ ancient tale into … Do you believe in destiny? “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. Stories are boring, some prisoners say; they’re depressing, they don’t change anything. 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.

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." © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. "Oedipus (Joshua Torrez) is a cocky, heavily tattooed youth who’s spent most of his life in lockup, now leaving behind both prison and Tiresias (Marc David Pinate), the man who raised him. 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. What Sophocles left offstage — the violence, the sex — Mr. Yew confidently stages. Torrez and Dias gamely endure a long sequence of naked entanglings. Review: A Timely Take on ‘Oedipus’ by Way of South Central Los … Here’s another gun-packing gangbanger who lives la vida loca and then reaps its bloody rewards. Oedipus El Rey: 2010 Premiere "Alfaro may be the first, Sophocles included, to place the love of Oedipus and Jocasta squarely at the play's tragic center. The latter tells Oedipus a parable-like story about a king (Eric Aviles) so fearful of an oracle’s prediction — that he’d be killed by his own son — he ordered a servant to slaughter his newborn child. If it begins feeling stagey, “Oedipus El Rey” becomes brutal and direct, but also graphically sensuous and oddly tender — ultimately in all ways gripping. There, he crashes with old acquaintance Creon (Armando Rodriguez), wasting little time taking over both the latter’s gangland business and the affections of his older, recently widowed sister Jocasta (Romi Dias). WORLD PREMIERE. 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. Then a Costco robbery lands him in lockup. And so it goes here. (If most of the language is vibrant, some of Mr. Alfaro’s Spanglish chat is equally risible: “Gato got your tongue?”)A couple of millenniums on, it isn’t much of a spoiler to note that Oedipus eventually blinds himself and Jocasta kills herself. 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. What preoccupied the Greeks — the shepherds, the oracles, the hunt for Laius’s murderer — falls away.This gives “Oedipus El Rey” swagger, oomph and economy, but it also makes for a salacious watch. Mr. Castano is at center in front of it. In America, there are stories we like to tell. But one chorus member says, “Stories are all we got.” So they shed the scrubs and take on the roles in this Oedipus update.As written by Sophocles, the original “Oedipus Rex” is an oldie but a goody, provided your definition of a goody is heavy on the incest and the self-mutilation. 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. Sometimes less is just less, as demonstrated by "Oedipus el Rey.


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