An East L.A. tale informed by a shocking Greek tragedy

When Theatre @ Boston Court’s production of Luis Alfaro’s “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,” opened this week at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, it marked the first time that the respected Pasadena-based theater company has presented a full production of a play that won’t run on its own stage.

This premiere production of Alfaro’s newly adapted contemporary take on the Euripides classic isn’t the only indication that Boston Court is breaking new ground by extending its reach: The company sent three of its productions to New York this year, another first.

The 2014 world premiere of Sheila Callaghan’s “Everything You Touch,” a co-production with New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, opened in February at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre, directed by Jessica Kubzansky, who shares Boston Court’s leadership with fellow founding co-artistic director Michael Michetti. Tom Jacobson’s “The Twentieth-Century Way,” which premiered at Boston Court in 2010 and went on to the New York International Fringe Festival, returned as a co-presentation with Rattlestick this summer at that company’s off-Broadway venue, under Michetti’s direction.

And finally, Boston Court’s highly lauded 2014 production of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” starring Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub, was remounted for a June and July run at the off-off Broadway Flea Theatre.

“It was not like we suddenly planned to do four productions out of house,” said Kubzansky, who is directing “Mojada.” “It was just a confluence of things that happened this year.”

Taking risks is nothing new for Boston Court. The company’s signature style since its inception in 2003 has been artist-driven work with a keen edge. Alfaro, an internationally known playwright, poet, performance artist and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, is a natural fit. His work is often rooted in the gritty Pico-Union area of Los Angeles where he grew up, and “Mojada” — the word means “wetback,” a derogatory term coined in the early 20th century, Alfaro explained — is not the first time he has been inspired by “the Greeks.”

Alfaro’s “Electricidad” and “Oedipus El Rey,” both hard-hitting, dark, and East L.A.-centric, were based on Sophocles’ “Electra” and “Oedipus Rex,” respectively. (In 2010, “Oedipus El Rey” debuted in a “rolling world premiere” at Boston Court, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co. in Washington, D.C.)

The Greek tragedies, he said, “have been, for me, a great sort of transition into thinking about culture and society. And I think the Greeks excite me because it’s a way of inviting my community to see themselves in the larger culture, to see ourselves as world artists.”

“I always knew that I was a writer,” Alfaro said. “But I didn’t know that I was a writer bigger than Pico Union. Then I realized that I could be a Latino writer, then, that I could be an American writer. And then I went to Europe and Mexico and Canada. And I thought, oh, I can be in the world.

“I’m always writing about a street corner known as Pico Union,” he added, “but I’m writing it in a larger context now.”

Still, Medea — whose murdering of innocents as revenge for her husband’s unfaithfulness continues to shock audiences — “might be the most frustrating of all the Greeks,” Alfaro said, because “she escapes on that chariot, and how dare she? So here I am writing a love story about Jason/Hason [he’s called “Hason” in Alfaro’s play] and Medea/Mojada, this couple that comes here against all these odds and ends up in Boyle Heights.”

His Medea is not a raging sorceress, Alfaro said. Her magical gift is “‘en las manos,’ in her hands,” he said. “She’s a seamstress who works out of her house in her backyard,” observing the world as an outsider, while her husband assimilates quickly. “He keeps saying to her, dress like them, be like them, act like them. He’s pushing her toward something and she’s trying to hold on to her past.”

An adaptation of Alfaro’s play staged earlier at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, this “Mojada” is “literally” a new play, he said, “in which L.A. is a character. You hear about the city, how it works and how people perceive it. In some ways I’m bringing East L.A. to the Getty.”

While not losing sight of the play’s ancient origins, “Mojada” is the story of Mexican immigrants who endure horrendous border crossings, Kubzansky said, “to come to L.A. as undocumented immigrants.” (Alfaro’s research turned up “a horrible statistic that says more than 50 percent of all women who cross into the U.S. illegally from Latin America are abused or assaulted in one way or another during their journey.”)

“It’s their attempts to survive,” Kubzansky said, “to figure out the new world, get ahead and do what’s best for their son.”

This retelling has also resolved Kubzansky’s long-standing antipathy toward the play, she said. “Luis has sort of changed the lens of the given circumstances just enough that, in this production, I completely empathize with why everybody does what they do.”

Alfaro had no idea, however, when he began writing this new adaptation that the topic of immigration would be a front-burner issue in the political arena. “The play does seem to have arrived at an interesting time,” he said.

“Mojada” was already in the works in partnership with the Getty Villa before Boston Court’s New York openings. Conversations about the show’s design began last October. The play is set in a Boyle Heights backyard, yet it had to be specific to the environment of the Getty Villa and its outdoor theater, a 450-seat venue based on ancient Greek and Roman prototypes. The planning process included a journey through Boyle Heights to find a house “that we thought echoed the Getty Villa architecture in some beautiful ways,” Kubzansky said.

(“We went in my late father’s van,” said Alfaro. “I gave them a tour of East L.A. architecture, then we went to eat at La Parilla, and then I took them for dessert at a churro stand on Whittier and Olympic.” Alfaro chuckled. “It was the best.”)

An image of the house that they chose during that trip inspired “Mojada’s” set design by Efren Delgadillo (who created a visual stir at the Villa in 2013 with his 5-ton wheel for CalArts Center for New Performance’s production of “Prometheus Bound.”)

Delgadillo’s “Mojada” centerpiece is a house with a sheer façade, that rolls onto the amphitheater stage after the invocation given by a curandera (a healer), and as the call of a guaco bird gives way “to the sound of a helicopter, the sound of a taco truck,” Kubzansky said.

“Basically, Boyle Heights shows up out of the ancient Greek,” she said. “In general, the tone of this play wants to be both intimate and grand, so finding the style, finding the reality, that was the challenge. Even the costumes “reference the Greek,” Kubzansky said, “but also look like East L.A. You’re never supposed to forget that we’re telling you the Medea story. We just want you to see the modern lens.”

“I set up some things,” said Alfaro, “that I think challenge the audience to not just go, ‘Hey, I’ve seen this play, I know the story and I’m going to lean back,’ but rather, ‘I’m going to have to lean forward, because they’re giving me all the beats, but they’re not playing by the rules.’ ”

“It’s exciting when being a theater continues to be dynamic,” Kubzansky said. “It’s so important. If you get into the same old-same old, that’s when stagnation happens.” And seeing the company grow beyond its local borders “is very much what we hope Boston Court gets to continue to do. Whether it will be in this rapid succession again, well, I have to say we didn’t plan that.”

“It’s been,” she added, “a little crazy.”

What: “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles”

Where: Getty Villa, Outdoor Auditorium, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Los Angeles

When: Runs 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Ends Oct. 3

Tickets: $40 to $45

More info: (310) 440-7300 or visit getty.edu/museum/programs/performances/outdoor_theater_15.html
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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.