The ancient legend of Medea has been rendered in many variations over the centuries. Luis Alfaro’s new version is titled Mojada, which bowed on Wednesday at the Public Theater.
Viewers familiar with Euripides’ classic Greek drama will note plot similarities in Alfaro’s modern-day play, but his heroine is unlike mythology’s bold enchantress/princess and the journey this Medea takes to a strange land where betrayal awaits her is scarcely a storybook affair.
In Alfaro’s situation, set in Queens today, Medea is an undocumented immigrant from rural Mexico—mojada is an ethnic slur akin to “wetback”—who toils as a gifted yet poorly-paid seamstress living in a rundown house that she is afraid to leave. She is the mother of one young son, Acan, who is cared for by Tita, a crusty Mexican nanny long in Medea’s service.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
No dashing adventurer, Jason is a construction worker who seeks to Americanize his life. Jason’s boss is Pilar, an older, wealthy, and initially kindly urban developer of Cuban origin, who eventually turns out to desire Medea’s hunky man for herself.
It all ends tragically, of course.
Alfaro previously and inventively adapted Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex into a contemporary account of Latinx gang warfare in Los Angeles, which he titled Oedipus El Rey. The Public Theater presented the play in late 2017 to considerable acclaim. In interviews, the playwright has said that he reinterprets Greek classics in order to deliver significant commentary about our times today.
Obviously, Mojada is intended to regard the undocumented immigrant experience and how these people are exploited when they finally reach America.
Midway through Alfaro’s trim 105-minute drama, the story flashes back twice to detail the dangerous, arduous, and altogether horrible trip that Medea, Jason, Tita, and Acan endure to get to the United States. Incidents of murder, rape, and grueling trekking are narrated by Medea as she and the others mime their desperate journey. Their presentational tribulations are reinforced by some fine atmospheric lighting from David Weiner and rich sound design by Mikhail Fiksel. These episodes, burning at the heart of Mojada, are the most eloquent passages in the play and its staging.
The rest of the drama is not nearly so effective. Character motivations are doubtful and abrupt, especially when Pilar and Jason suddenly turn ugly towards Medea. The figure of Luisa, a cheerful Puerto Rican churros vendor, in spite of an exuberant performance by Vanessa Aspillaga, seems incidental to the story. The reasons why Medea and her loved ones struggle to get to America and the exploitation they encounter after they arrive are too vaguely dramatized.
Chay Yew, the excellent director who did so well by Oedipus El Rey, obtains only patchy acting for this production. In their respective roles as faithless Jason and ruthless Pilar, Alex Hernandez and Ada Maris are able, but Socorro Santiago merely repeats her usual crabby old lady routine as Tita. Hobbled by the woefully underwhelming way that Alfaro characterizes Medea—as a mostly fearful, compliant drudge whose strongest emotion is homesickness—Sabina Zúñiga Varela’s solemn portrait of the heroine generally registers as a dolorous woman in white.
In the same way that Alfaro inadequately construes his modern Medea as a damaged victim of cruel circumstances, so too does the playwright’s version of this classic story lack the sense of gravitas and grandeur that should elevate it beyond revenge and filicide in a back yard in Queens into something brave and even noble.
Compounding the playwright’s drab depiction of Medea, perhaps it is the absence of a Greek drama-style chorus to reinforce the character’s should-be shocking actions with communal insights and comment that makes Mojada seem less like a timeless saga reborn than a nasty incident that likely would rate only three paragraphs today in the New York Post.
Mojada opened July 17, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through August 11. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
