Ancient Greece becomes a modern-day Los Angeles barrio in “Oedipus El Rey,” MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient Luis Alfaro’s update of “Oedipus Rex.” Seldom has Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old iconic tragedy been made to feel so contemporary or so raw. Aflaro has resequenced things where it suits him, brought events that once occurred offstage on-, turned up the volume on some characters’ motives, and brought the incestuous mother-son affair to the fore. For all that, the basic narrative remains recognizable and retains its primal authority: A king receives a fearful prophecy that leads him to order the death of his infant son, but the lieutenant ordered to commit infanticide can’t go through with it. Oedipus — a nuanced Andres Munar — lives to slay his father, ascend the throne, marry and bed his mother, and then gouge his own eyes out from grief when he learns the truth.
| Onstage |
| ‘Oedipus El Rey’ Where: Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company |
| When: 8 p.m. Wednesday to Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; through March 6 |
| Info: $35 and up; woollymammoth.net |
Credit Alfaro, and especially director Michael John Garces, then, for giving this old saw sharp new teeth. Corinth, where Oedipus grew up apart from his parents, is now North Kern State Prison, and the chorus is the pack of tattooed, scalp-shaved toughs who accompany Oedipus on his workout regimen in the yard. The long odds against Latino gang members finding honest work upon their release from prison makes their unhappy end as inescapable as Oedipus’, Alfaro suggests. The atmosphere of imminent violence is constant, a combination of the cast’s toughness and scene and lighting designers Misha Kachman and Colin K. Bills’ rich visual environment, all menacing shadows and inky corners. The distorted electronic score ratchets up the threat, too.
When Oedipus encounters a man blocking his path along a narrow road, we can barely see through the dimmed lighting the brutal melee that results, wherein the young man kills the older one, whom he does not yet know is his own father, fulfilling a grim prophecy. Being deprived of sight only deepens the audience’s sense and vulnerability in a evening that crackles with electricity even as it oppresses us with the weight of the inevitable tragedy to come.
The palpable lust when Oedipus and Jocasta (the regal, coiled Romi Dias) consummate their unwittingly incestuous affair is down to nothing but the actors. They both disrobe, fully lit at the center of the stage, mere feet from the audience, utterly exposed and vulnerable. It wouldn’t be a tragic, epic, doomed love affair if they just kinda liked each other, would it? They need to devour each other, and the two courageous actors do exactly that.
