If you met Luis Alfaro on the street or had a conversation with him over drinks, as I did one snowy evening in January, I doubt you would peg him for someone who would be drawn to adapting violent Greek tragedies. He’s a buoyant fellow, good-hearted and warm. It’s hard to place what would draw him to Euripides’s bleak vision in the classic tragedy of Medea.

In Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles, Alfaro has recast the original Medea as a story of an undocumented Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles and her relationships with her family and community members. Alfaro does not shrink one bit from the often-painful moments in the play. Indeed, he even chose to use a racial epithet in the title—mojada (“wetback”), derogatory slang for Latinx immigrants who arrive in the United States “wet” from furtive border crossings through water.

This painful reference may well be off-putting to some. Yet Alfaro is not naïve, nor is he merely a provocateur. His own life circumstances have put him in regular contact with the experiences of those at the margins: The California-born son of Mexican-American farmworkers, he grew up in a very violent, very poor Los Angeles neighborhood where drive-by shootings were common. From his parents, Alfaro received love, a deep religious faith (his father was Catholic and his mother Pentecostal) and a passion for social justice honed in advocacy for the rights of farmworkers. As a gay man interested in the arts, he was always the “other” in a macho-oriented culture.

A major window opened when, at age 15, Alfaro was arrested for shoplifting and was offered community service at a theatre. From there, he found his way to poetry and the performing arts. Eventually, after he began to achieve some success as a poet, teacher, performer and curator of interdisciplinary artistic productions, Alfaro was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1997.

Writing among unheard voices

Much of the conflict in Mojada revolves around the ways people at the margins sometimes climb over each other in their attempts to improve their circumstances. Yet Alfaro has leveraged his successes as a means for living at the intersections where some of the most difficult and neglected stories live. He teaches in the School of Dramatic Arts at USC, a privileged and expensive private university in Los Angeles, but approaches the craft of writing as a product of community building. He often holds classes at public sites in struggling parts of the city to help awaken young artists to their connection to the broader world. His own process of play development often arises from living with people at the margins—among drug addicts in Medford, young undocumented immigrants in Chicago or young felons in Tucson. “The community gives you the language and the authenticity,” he explains.

Alfaro employs his curiosity and warmth in listening for the contradictions, complexities and trauma that lead people to make choices that would otherwise be unthinkable. “What happens when you are isolated?” he wonders. “How does trauma inform your choices?”

These skills have made him the ideal playwright in residence for OSF, a Mellon-funded post that has brought him into deep relationship with the community here since 2013. It also has helped him to avoid the ego-traps that exist in the arts. He speaks gratefully of how the early success of his play Straight as a Line in New York was undercut by a couple of terrible reviews, leading to a sudden (though temporary) drop in audiences until a positive review came out in The New York Times. As painful as that was, it helped Alfaro to disconnect from the ego benefits that sometimes come from theatrical success and to focus instead on where the flow of community takes him and authentically telling the stories most in need of understanding.

Finding contemporary resonance in ancient Greek tales

One of the significant directions that flow has taken him in recent years is to the ancient Greeks. Alfaro’s public school education in Los Angeles did not involve any deep immersion in the classics. His interest came much later. While teaching a poetry workshop for young felons in Tucson, he encountered a sweet 13-year-old girl who, it turned out, had murdered her mother to avenge the death of her father, whose murder the girl’s mother had arranged. Shortly after that, Alfaro stumbled on a collection of the ancient Greek playwrights and read Sophocles’s Electra, whose story line is similar to the girl’s.

Alfaro’s religious upbringing and his own well-honed intuition have taught him to pay attention when such connections cross his path, and his play Electricidad was the result. His version of the Greek classic is set against a backdrop of gang violence and warfare that shapes the choices of the young protagonist. Similarly, his reimagining of Sophocles’s Oedipus (Oedipus el Rey) arose out of an artist’s residency at a California state prison, and is set against a backdrop of the tragic inevitability of a life of violence in the inner city.

The ancient Greeks, Alfaro says, provide a time-honored entry point into stories we only partly know and mostly don’t want to look at. “Our questions about the world get answered in the Greek plays,” he says. In Mojada, he seeks to show the faces of the undocumented, the starkness and extraordinarily high stakes for the choices they must make, the brutalities against which they are utterly defenseless. We have little appetite for such stories, but framing the tale inside literature that has already been identified as classic, and which poses ultimate questions, makes it possible to go to the deep places we would otherwise avoid. The connection with classic Greek literature helps us find identification points with stories of the “other.” As Alfaro points out, “People don’t notice that these are really love stories.”

More information about Luis Alfaro and Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles can be found here and in Illuminations, OSF’s season guide to the plays, which is on sale in the Tudor Guild and the theatres.