Oedipus el Rey: Luis Alfaro challenges destiny

Battling the pull of "Fate" and "Destiny" has been a common pop culture storyline for centuries.  

Over two thousand years ago, the story line included oracles, incest and murder in what could be considered the original Greek tragedy of Oedipus the King.  If you don’t remember from high school English class, that's the play where the central character, Oedipus, is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. 

Macarthur-award-winning playwright Luis Alfaro saw the modern-day relevance of Oedipus' story in California's prisons. He was so alarmed by the recidivism rate, especially among Latino men, that Alfaro updated Sophocles's tragedy with an all-Latino cast and set it in a poor neighborhood of East Los Angeles.

The adaptation is called “Oedipus El Rey,” and it’s now playing at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Reporter Emily Wilson went to the performance to see how Alfaro makes this centuries-old story relevant today. 

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OEDIPUS EL REY: “I am the accursed, I am Oedipus. A son of royalty, but a product of mortal man. Tonight I have seen that I have been the fool, just a bit player in a story you all know too well.”

EMILY WILSON: The story is the age-old tale of fate and destiny, but this character is not Oedipus Rex, the character from Sophocles’s famous Greek play. It is Oedipus el Rey, a Latino former inmate, trying to navigate the world beyond prison walls.

 LUIS ALFARO: Can you change your destiny? Can you change the path you’ve been given?

That’s the author of the play, Luis Alfaro.

ALFARO: For me, so much of that has to do with the prison system in California because we have an extremely high recidivism rate, which is 65%.

And the Governor says it could be even higher. 

ALFARO: So I was trying to figure out some way of addressing this issue of what happens when you get out and can you change your life.

“Oedipus El Rey” follows the storyline of the Greek myth, but this Oedipus becomes a gang leader on the streets of Los Angeles. Alfaro set the play in a poor violent neighborhood of L.A., Pico Union, where he grew up. 

 This isn’t the first time Alfaro has re-imagined a classic to look at contemporary life. He wrote his play “Electricidad” after meeting a girl in a youth authority program who had murdered her mother.

 ALFARO: That night I went into the bookstore and they had ten Greeks for $10.  So I bought this little collection and the first play I read was “Electra,” the story of a young girl who is avenging her father’s death by killing her mother, right? And here’s that same story 1,400 years ago, and we’re still in the cycle of violence and cycle of revenge, the cycle of ignorance, the cycle of poverty. And so this is fascinating to me that these stories still resonate today.

Using the classics to tell modern stories can be tricky. The artistic director of the Magic Theatre, Loretta Greco, says people need to forget they know the ending, which in this play is Oedipus unknowingly killing his father and marrying his mother. Greco thinks Alfaro brings people into the play by focusing on the love story between Oedipus and his mother Jocasta.

JOCASTA: Stop talking to me like you know me.

OEDIPUS: I do. I look at you and I feel like a sentence got finished. I don’t know why. It’s not a feeling it’s right here, like a hole got filled.

LORETTA GRECO: You really anchor the story in something all of us can understand and that is what happens when you look into somebody’s eyes and there are just electrical currents going off and you just know you’re destined to be together.

Greco says using the chorus in traditional Greek-style also draws the audience into the play.

CHORUS: Why, why oh Lord does someone else get to be El Rey? Why don’t the greedy ever fill up?

GRECO: Soon their plight sounds an awful lot like our own because they’ve got their beef with God, and who doesn’t have their beef with God? And they’ve got their beef about their disappointments, and who doesn’t have disappointments?

One of the members of the chorus is Carlos Aguirre. He has taught beatboxing, theater and songwriting all over the Bay Area, working with at-risk youth as well as people in jail. Aguirre says teaching in the jail made him think about why people go in certain directions.

CARLOS AGUIRRE: Some people, I’m like you’re not going to be here again, and some people they seem like man, you just seem like you’re fated, like they’re just fated to come back. A lot of the problem with that is that a lot of the guys view it’s their most comfortable place to be in jail. That’s their only meals. I mean some of them really go through extensive struggles and I think jail sometimes can be a relief, which is crazy to me to think about. 

Aguirre, who has done a rap version of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” says he’s not interested in doing the classics unless they have something relevant to say to youth. He thinks “Oedipus el Rey” does.

AGUIRRE: You have to try to control your destiny. So if you try, even if the bigger hand takes you a different way, I mean you have to try and I think a lot of youth give up. They don’t want to try. And I think Oedipus tries, and I think that’s important for them to see.

Alfaro echoes Aguirre’s view that in prisons and in gang life, men often find the support, loyalty, and power they aren’t getting on the outside. When they get out of prison, they get $200 maybe some vouchers for single-room occupancy hotels. Alfaro says, that doesn’t give them a lot of options.

ALFARO: If you come to LA, the first place you land where there are SRO hotels is skid row. So you’re going right to the center of major drug activity, prostitution, gang activity. So you’re going right back into the life you led.

Alfaro doesn’t think his play offers solutions to the problems it brings to light, but he wants to start by bringing up these important questions. This recent interpretation, as well as the original story written thousands of years ago, explores how to balance controlling your destiny, and accepting you’re not in control of everything.

CHORUS: Why is it always someone else everyone else loves? If it’s just fate, then why don’t you pick me?

From San Francisco, I’m Emily Wilson for Crosscurrents.

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“Oedipus el Rey” will be playing through February 28^th at the Magic Theatre in Fort Mason.