As Artistic Director Bill Rauch enters his second decade of leadership, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) its eighty-second season of producing plays in the dedicated town of Ashland, the festival has much to celebrate. Nowhere are the company’s ambitions and excellence clearer than in Luis Alfaro’s magnificent, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles and in the stage version of the beloved film, Shakespeare In Love, making its North American premiere. Both are destined to be classics, not only in the repertoire of this distinguished theatre festival of Shakespeare-and-so-much-more, but in the case of Alfaro’s epic, one that will find its place amongst masterpieces of post-Modern America. On my advice, get yourself down to Ashland early this season, before all the prices rise or tickets become unavailable. You will experience what are likely to be the hits of the decade. The rollicking backstage comedy of Shakespeare’s imagined life and loves, and the twenty-first century tragedy of a Mexican immigrant woman who must murder her beloved son, are such triumphant prices of theatre that any trip to Ashland including one of these plays will live in your memory for many years.
In Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles, Alfaro re-stories Euripides’ infanticidal queen as a devoted, yet terrorized Mexican mother and wife in today’s world. Medea (pronounced Meh-DAY-ah, played by Sabina Zuniga Varela), her son Acán (Jahnangel Jimenez) and their family maid Tita (VIVIS) have made the horrifying journey from their home of Michaoacán Mexico to settle with Jason (Lakin Valdez, pronounced “Ha-SOHN”) in Boyle Heights, an enclave of Latina/o communities outside Los Angeles. Jason is Medea’s common-law husband and Acán’s father. Rarely home, Jason’s ambitions are warping his career in construction towards the desires of his boss, Armida (Vilma Silva) a Mexican immigrant who has assimilated and profited her way into wealth and legal status, and aims to have Jason for her own. Nearly suffocating in a truck packed with human beings and running from the accidental yet just death of her brother, Medea’s memories haunts the present with the truths of the past, as did her counterparts in the Greek Theatre in their epic poems and songs thousands of years ago. Medea of Boyle Heights, like Medea of Greek tragedy, has magical powers she is able to weave, or in this case, stitch, into cloth. Despite her gifts, Alfaro’s Medea is a piece-maker for machine-made cheap dresses, and slaves away over a sewing machine in her own yard, too terrified to venture out. I hesitate to give away more of the effortless correlation Alfaro makes between his story of a betrayed and desperate Medea and her fore-sister. Suffice it to say that Medea has left everything behind for her devotion to her son and his future, and the ultimate treachery of her husband— her spouse in all but legal terms—casts her out into a world she will not survive. The lack of legal papers of her marriage proves the twist in the knife that pierces Medea’s trust for the last and final time.
It is Tita, as devoted to Medea as a mother, yet treated by Jason as useless and aging domestic help, who becomes the Chorus. Tita transits the line between addressing us directly as cultural tour guide of Boyle Heights and Mexican culture and stepping back into the world of the play, where her Medea requires endless protection, through magical spells and actions. Neighbor Josefina (Nancy Rodriguez), longing to give birth to a child who could be an American, ends up shunning Medea when her friendship is most needed. Medea’s last lifeline is gone, even Tita is powerless against the forces of fate which have lined up against her.
Mojada is the feminized term for mojado, or wetback—the name given to those Mexicans who tried and often succeeding in reaching the states by swimming the Rio Grande. The term morphed into a slur in the border states of the U.S; as cruel a term as nigger. There is no redemption in Medea; catharsis, in an Aristotelian sense, is what unfolds for audiences in the tumultuous, intermission-less 90-minute journey. We weep, understanding Medea’s actions. We grieve for her imprisonment—a stranger in a foreign country, betrayed by those she loved and whom she believed loved her, haunted by her past and losing hope for the future. We experience her terror. We cry with pity and fear, some of us with empathy and compassion, others with recognition. I am confident Alfaro’s play, like that of his artistic ancestor, will stand the test of time. Yet its urgent story is immediately relevant, and this is why I urge readers to go to Ashland this year. Director Juliette Carrrillo, Scenic and Costume Designer Christopher Acebo, along with Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz, David Molina and Kaitlyn Pietras (Sound, Lights and Video design, respectively) have created a world that is at-once near-naturalism and suddenly implodes to magical realism. The cursed garment that Medea sends to the vicious Armida is a coup dê teatre , and a testament to the power of artistic collaboration. Carrillo has established herself as the mistress of magic realism for the American stage, and I hope she will be directing at Ashland on a regular basis.
I will save most of my comments about the delightful-from-beginning-to-end Shakespeare in Love. Go ahead, see the movie again before you see the stage play. Or see it afterward. Each vehicle will help you appreciate the other more, and make any lover of the theatre only love the theatre more. Director Christopher Liam Moore managed to corral nearly every drop of comic talent in OSF’s acting company to fill the stage with virtuosity from the big roles of William Shakespeare (William DeMeritt) and Viola de Lesseps (Jamie Ann Romero—who I couldn’t take my eyes off she is so luminescent onstage), to the smallest role of a wannabe actor with a stutter (Rex Young) who ends up overcoming his speech impediment to win applause. My favorite was Cristofer Jean as Lady Capulet, with a ridiculous underwire of a hoopskirt and the gestural exactness of the great Edward Kynaston. Theatre does this for people, we overcome our shyness and terror of “the other,” our impediments to expression and personal obstacles to power. Viola, a girl of privilege destined to be trapped into a loveless, arranged marriage, longs to be a part of it. Disguising herself as a man, she…..but wait! I promised I wouldn’t tell! Moore creates as much joy in his acting company as Shakespeare might have hoped to with his. Go get some for yourself, and bring the kids.
There are so many wonderful connections with others of Shakespeare ‘s plays. We see the seedlings of Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Hamlet The Tempest….. Perhaps Shakespeare in Love is most reminiscent of Midsummers’ mechanicals, rehearsing for Pyramus and Thisne, to be performed before the queen. Shakespeare in Love doubles one in laughter, and yet ends with the kind of melancholy that only deepens one’s longing for more adventure, and more immersion into the world of this wondrous writer.
As a counterpoint to the brilliance of Mojada and Shakespeare in Love, two of the first productions of this 2017 season are less than satisfying, shaky with immature direction and heavy-handed, even clumsy concepts. Despite the brilliant comic prose of G. Valmont Thomas as Falstaff, the spot-on casting of the gender-fluid actress Alejandra Escalante as Hotspur and Daniel José Molina’s brooding Prince Hall, director Lileana Blain-Cruz is over her head in bringing I Henry IV to the intimate arena stage. This I Henry IV and director Shana Cooper’s Julius Caesar both suffer from “concepts” devised by director and designers together, and yet which in these cases, commit the ultimate error of having little to do with the storytelling at hand. Harsh fluorescent lights, attached to angular, non-weight-bearing aluminum poles (I could smell actor frustration) may have worked as trees for Henry‘s forest battle in renderings on the page, but not so on the stage. A wrapped statue towering upstage (and upstaging all of the actors) may have “represented” Caesar, but what matter? Onstage these are visual gestures, but also distractions which do not aid in the storytelling. Both Henry and Caesar felt like unsuccessful college “verse projects” for the director/designer relationship. Sorry to be so harsh, but these two productions paled in every respect when compared to the stand-out work in Medea and Shakespeare in Love. Hard to believe it was the same theatre company; given the depth of the acting company and the overall excellence of the designers, I have to hold these directors responsible for the missed aim. I am certain that later in the season these two difficult Shakespeare history plays will deepen; later in the year G. Valmont Thomas will be playing Falstaff in parts I and II and the chance to see him in one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters is worth a trip south. If you time it right, you can also see the hysterical K.T. Vogt play one of the first female Falstaffs in Merry Wives of Windsor. (Not the first, as I saw the late, great Marjorie Nelson play him at the Village Theatre last century; all-female Shakespeares are making the rounds). If you are a theatre nerd who craves the history plays, I am sure the productions will get better in time.
The ever-evolving acting company of more than seventy-five marvelously diverse actors provides the joys of virtuosity and the challenges of apprenticeships to audiences, and no doubt, to their directors. Overall, it is marvelous to watch an acting company and a fully-resourced theatre at work. Once again, OSF has established itself as the nearest thing the United States has to a national theatre company. With the very survival of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities at stake under the current administration, the leadership and national profile of OSF becomes evermore critical. As the first seventy-five years brought OSF to this current moment, we now have a company that is present in many corners of American performance culture including Broadway, regional theatre, film/television, and producing entities in amateur and educational settings. With Rauch at the helm and the company’s embodied and budgetary commitment to inclusion, diversity, fiscal responsibility and new work, OSF sets an artistic and business standard for the country. If only we will pay attention. Hie thee to Ashland.