If you want to leave audiences in suspense about how your play ends, it’s probably not the best idea to name your central character Medea.
This was, apparently, not a concern for Luis Alfaro in crafting Mojada. When the play—part of a trilogy revisiting Greek classics through the lens of Latinx characters, also including Oedipus El Rey and Electridad—was first produced several years back, and in other iterations, it was subtitled A Medea in Los Angeles. Alfaro has since relocated the drama to Queens, where his Medea, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, works as a seamstress, while her partner, Jason—the name of Euripides’s protagonist’s beau as well, though it’s pronounced “Ha-sewn” in Alfaro’s play—pursues his American dream through construction work.
“His” is a key pronoun here, as to say that Alfaro’s Medea doesn’t share her lover’s ambition would be a vast understatement. We first see her waving a pair of banana palms and slapping them together, and chanting in an indigenous language of her native country, in a ritual that she will repeat. “If you do this, Acan,” she assures her 10-year-old son, “you can make your way home.”
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★ review here.]
Such a journey is not in the cards for Medea and Jason and their child, or for Tita, the domestic worker who has cared for Medea since childhood, and dutifully accompanied them on the harrowing journey from a farm in Zamora to New York City—a trek documented in flashbacks narrated by Medea, so rife with violence and deprivation and despair that you can practically smell the sweat and see the carnage she describes. (Her family members and others appear in these passages, among them ICE agents, but the more graphic bits are not, mercifully, reenacted.)
If these recollections can be devastating in their timeliness, Medea’s life in the barrio proves less compelling. Arnulfo Maldonado’s magnificent scenic design, which sets the worn two-story home Jason’s boss has provided for the family against a brilliant backdrop of blue sky and lush greenery—Medea’s embellishments and sources of comfort—better captures the spirit of magical realism that has clearly inspired Alfaro than his obvious dialogue, which too often threatens to reduce the characters to stereotypes.
Jason, imbued with a hearty and initially winning masculinity in Alex Hernandez’s performance, is the hyper-ambitious immigrant too willing to abandon his heritage, ordering Acan (a sweet, spry Benjamin Luis McCracken) to dress like an American, and urging Medea to do the same. “You need to learn to be of this place,” he tells her, adding, “One day this dream will be ours.”
Tita, conversely, played with wry knowing by Socorro Santiago, is forever lamenting how life is more trying or less fair than it was in the old country, like an aging aunt telling her nieces how much better things were in her time—though she has a fellow spirit, in this case, in Sabina Zúñiga Varela’s plaintive Medea, who floats across the stage in a wispy white dress (Haydee Zelideth designed the crisp, telling costumes), an angel unmoored from her notion of heaven.
There’s also Luisa, a feisty, fast-talking Puerto Rican who sells churros from a cart—well-played by the irrepressible Vanessa Aspillaga—and Jason’s employer, Pilar, a slightly older woman whom we identify as the villain as soon as she identifies herself as Cuban-born—that is, belonging to the Latin demographic considered most likely to vote Republican.
If anyone familiar with the original Medea will immediately recognize Pilar’s function, the twists that precipitate Mojada‘s tragic ending struck me as freshly contrived. I felt for Ada Maris, the attractive and agile actress cast as Pilar, as she was thrust into the role of soap-opera virago, pushing our poor, pure, put-upon heroine to such depths of anguish that she…
But I won’t spill the particulars, even if you can guess the gist. Certainly, Mojada is not a work to be dismissed, given its vital subject matter and the lyrical passion that both Alfaro and director Chay Yew have invested in this production. I just wish that those assets had been less burdened with banality.
Mojada opened July 17, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through August 11. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
