Oedipus el Rey

Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago

(773) 871-3000

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“There is sheer transformative genius at work in Oedipus el Rey,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Playwright Luis Alfaro always had a clever concept: He aimed with this 2010 drama to transplant Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to South Central Los Angeles. But here, in a newly revised version, Alfaro’s adaptation has matured into “a stunner”—a work that seems to have located “the most inspired contemporary correspondences for every element of Sophocles’s drama.” Prison inmates become Alfaro’s Greek chorus as their block mate Oedipus, raised by a blind man who’d been instructed to kill him as an infant, defies advice upon his release and heads to L.A. to make his fortune in the drug trade. What follows is a fatal run-in with his own kingpin father (an ideally arrogant Madrid St. Angelo), plus a gripping exploration of “the tension between fate and free will, and the nature of our most primal drives.”

With all its “kingpins, parallel city-states, and love of myths,” L.A.’s gang world is a potent setting for this story, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. In a way, Sophocles was kinder to Oedipus, making the wrenching downfall he endures necessary, in the end, to free his people from a curse. Here, the young leader’s tragedy “flows more from his arrogance.” But that hardly diminishes the devastating impact of the infamous moment when Oedipus realizes that his lover is his mother, and that it was he who widowed her. Especially because a naked Adam Poss and Charin Alvarez have just completed a “long and sultry” bedroom scene when the realization strikes. “One woman near me let out a howl.”

The play “lags occasionally,” but its flaws are easily forgiven, said Lisa Buscani in NewcityStage.com. Modern interpretations of the classics are very much hit-or-miss efforts. At their best, they can highlight the timelessness of ancient drama; at their worst, they’re gimmicky, forced updates. Alfaro’s work is undoubtedly “a successful collapse of high and low brow.” It draws pulp immediacy from its barrio and prison settings, but “reinforces the tragedy of hubris” in a way that’s eternally relevant.