February 24th, 2010. Posted by Cari Turley at 4:57 pm
After three months of bicoastal phone calls and emails, Playwright Luis Alfaro and Dramaturg Jane Ann Crum sat down to talk about Greek plays, Chicano culture, prisons, and poetry.
Jane Ann Crum: When did you become interested in the story of Oedipus?
Luis Alfaro: You kind of go through all the myths in grade school, don’t you? Then, when you get to junior high or middle school, the more complicated ones get introduced, right? [Laughter] Then, ten years ago, I was in Arizona on a residency and I went into a bookstore and the Greeks were on sale. They were selling ten plays for ten dollars, and I thought, “OMG, a Greek play a dollar!” [More laughter] The first one I read was Electra. I was working on this piece about a young girl who had murdered her mother in Tucson and it was amazing that these stories mirrored each other. That became my play, Electricidad. Ever since the Greeks entered my life ten years ago, finding the connections between the Greeks and now has become something of an obsession with me. Generally I write an adaptation followed by an original play and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last five or six years. I use the adaptation as a way of trying to become a better writer. The thing about the Greeks is that they’re so brilliantly written. In 90 minutes such extraordinary things happen–the whole cycle of life and death.
So you read Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and loved its structure and techniques. Are there visual things–images, for instance–that come to you when you’re writing?
For me, all writing is imagistic. When I first started to write [Luis studied playwriting with Cuban-American playwright, Maria Irene Fornes] one of the things Irene used to do was make us draw. I still draw; I storyboard my plays. And I believe that the theatre is one of those sacred places where you don’t have to travel in real time and you don’t have to ground a play in naturalism. My play Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner has a 750 lb woman who flies. I just wrote a play called Hero in which the bedroom walls of a young man who has come back from the Iraq war allow the war into his bedroom. I’m always dealing with imagistic, fantastical ideas that the Greek plays lend themselves to–that your nightmares can become prophecies.
Yet your plays are written to be very simply staged.
That comes from being raised in the teatro campesino tradition–poor man’s theatre, inventing stuff from the earth. My plays tend to be suggestive and sometimes they get in trouble when they land on a realistic set. I’m always excited when a director sees a play as an imagistic thing more than just a language thing.
The first reading of the first draft of Oedipus el Rey was held at the Getty Villa in Malibu. How did that come about and how did you and Loretta get together?
The Getty Villa has a Greek amphitheater in their outdoor space and one of their initiatives is to invite artists to re-imagine Greek plays. They asked, among others, Anne Bogart to do one; also Joanne Akalaitis and Stephen Wadsworth.
Those are directors, not writers.
Well, my residency was split with Ellen McLaughlin, who was writing Penelope. I thought connecting a prison world with a classical space seemed really fun so that’s how it started. Then we coupled a Greek scholar, Mary Hart, with a gang scholar, Father Greg Boyle, who heads an organization called Homeboy Industries. So we had a contemporary specialist and a specialist in the classics. It was a hard process because I had no material other than my research. I started writing scenes during the 10 rehearsal days so whatever I ended up with was what I ended up with, which was (I think) about 45–50 minutes of material. If you were an audience member on the night of the first reading, you’d hear scene 4 read aloud, and then someone would announce “Scene 5 to be written.”
But audiences love that!
I have to say they did and the conversations afterward were amazing. Anyway, Loretta heard about it, and even though I never send out unfinished material, when she said “Really, just let me see the unfinished draft,” I thought, “She’s a good friend” so I let her read it.
And you hooked up. She was interested in producing Oedipus el Rey, so she went down to L.A. and the two of you did some interviews…
Those interviews were part of a larger research push. I drove up Highway 99 three or four times. I went to Delano and stayed there for a little bit. I started reading up on the prison system and the California prison system in particular.
You’ve worked in prisons before and you’ve worked with prisoners…
Yeah, but part of your job as an artist in the prison system is to subvert. You get 30 prisoners who are supposed to do a poetry workshop and none of them can write, so you’re always subverting the system. It’s different when you read about the prison system and its formalities, the way the prison system is set up and how many we have. The building of prisons right now, the overcrowding and this injunction we just got–it’s all about money. All information about prisons fascinates me.
The high recidivism rate you were talking about…
More than half of all men released go back immediately, within hours. You get out and if you don’t have a support system you’re going straight into an SRO hotel/motel in downtown L.A. on skid row. Already the vices are calling you back.
The environment may not be a prison, but the situation hasn’t really changed.
In downtown Los Angeles, skid row accounts for a third of all the drugs that go through the city. When people get out of jail and prison, they make that their first stop because they need a cheap place to stay overnight.
How did you find the former prisoners you and Loretta interviewed?
Father Boyle’s organization, Homeboy Industries helps gang members get out of gangs. It’s about tattoo removal, but it’s also about mental health. They offer services like social workers and mental health technicians. So we met a counselor first, an older woman, who actually picked the guys for us to interview. We were looking for someone who had recently gotten out and someone who had been in prison a long, long time. We couldn’t ask what their crime was, but we could ask anything else. And that was interesting to hear–to really let people talk about what that life is and how they got into that life. You know–the generational histories of lawlessness [Chuckle]. The challenge was to locate the play somewhere very specific. To look at Los Angeles as a site.
Because Pico/Union [a neighborhood in East L.A.] is your home.
I wanted to locate it in places I knew I could write honestly and freely about. That pharmacy near the Million Dollar store? [In Oedipus el Rey, the Farmacia where the Esphinge (the Sphinx) lives] I really knew that place.
You showed the cast pictures of your family home and that’s the home we’ve chosen for Jocasta and Laius.
I’m not sure I’ll ever do that again! [Laughter] But I think it’s a good thing to locate a play in a place you know. I keep finding that as you grow as a writer, you’re dying to bust out of the same old thing. But for Oedipus, because the emotional qualities of the play are so intense, I knew I had to locate everything else in a familiar place.
So you didn’t write the play chronologically?
I always write out of order.
Would you mind sharing what scene you wrote first?
The first scene I wrote was the meeting of Oedipus and Jocasta–him coming out of prison, going to his friend’s house and meeting this woman, this widow in grief–him needing to be healed and her needing to be healed, these two lost souls in the world who find each other and connect. They fit.
And it’s like lightning between them.
If you can locate the emotional center of a play you can build out from there. It’s always harder structurally if you don’t have an emotional center somewhere. I tend to write the scene before or the scene after the most dramatic scene, just to locate where the most dramatic scene IS. For me, that seems like the right way to work.
What about the chorus? It’s such a standard of Greek plays, and so many of us have suffered through so many (how shall I put it?) unfortunate choruses. What’s your connection to what is called in your play, the Coro?
We have a choral tradition in the Chicano culture called “Coro,” where you tell stories and it’s very intricate work–many different voices overlapping and finishing each others’ sentences. It’s musical and it shares a history with folkloric dancing. In the seventies, lots of teatros did Coro work and you’d go see it because it was sort of like watching ballet–beautiful, highly technical and hard to do. Thirty-something years ago, after the riots in East L.A, this word “Chicano” (that really expresses a politicized Mexican-American) started to take shape and “Chicano pride” became a huge part of what we were. So it feels like, in some ways, the chorus represents Chicanos, because it represents
that pride, that community. Regardless of whether it’s educated or not, it’s a voice. I love that in the Greeks, the chorus might be the puppet-masters, too. Do you know what I’m saying?
That’s what Nietzsche said, that the audience dreams the chorus and the chorus dreams the actors.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
Greek drama began with the chorus–everything was choral, just like in your tradition of Coro. Choruses of fifty men or boys sang dithyrambs, hymns to Lord Dionysius, moving in time with the rhythms of the poetry, and then, gradually, over time, the actors stepped out of the chorus to become the personifications of individual characters.
There are so many connections between my culture and the Greeks, and I love how we’re able to make this contemporary for our people. By our people, I mean whoever the audience is that night. That’s who we’re making it for. It seems like the right thing to do at this moment in time, as technology advances. I have this theory, “The more we have the less we get.”
You mean the more information that’s out there, the less intelligent we become?
That we’re actually shrinking our intellect, shrinking our imagination. So this seems the right time to go back to something primal, something indigenous, something original, as a way of discovering who we are today. My plays are simple that way. I’d rather have the creativity happening in the audience’s head. I write simply. I want to think that I’m complicated, but I’m not.
You’re a poet. In the rehearsal room you’re always talking about poetry. You’ll say: “This is a song. This is a poem.”
I feel that a play is a long-form poem. It doesn’t seem so far away from when I was writing traditional poetry. The minute voices started happening, metaphor started freeing me, there were rhythms, and my writing became so much more interesting. Maybe I’d trapped myself as a poet into a certain way of thinking. The theatre released all that. You
know. The empty space…
Well, you fill it. That’s for certain.
We do not serve hot chocolate, but any rainy day will have at least 3 requests for it. Patrons may not notice, but great pains are taken to thematically honor the show both in and out of the theatre itself: the art, the walls, even the music playing in the lounge before the show are tailored for each performance. “Mood enhancers” if you will.
