“Medea” Meets the Media

Last Week, Getty Villa Previewed Luis Alfaro and Jessica Kubzansky’s Contemporary Take on an Ancient Greek Play, Opening Sept. 10

By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Pali Life Editor

Standing in front of a roomful of press last Tuesday at the Getty Villa’s Foundation room, theater director Jessica Kubzansky shared a shocking confession: she never cared for Euripides’ “Medea” play.

“Until I read this one,” Kubzansky said. “I’m so interested now in their trials and tribulations.”

“This one” being “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,” Luis Alfaro’s contemporary, East Los Angeles-set retelling of “Medea,” which Kubzansky helms when it opens to the public at the Villa on September 10.

The play stars Sabina Zuniga Vallera in the title role and Zilah Mendoza as Josefina, a composite of two characters from the Euripides play. “Mojada,” by the way, is Spanish for the “wetback” slur and a reference to the Mexicans who swam across the Rio Grande to cross into America. At the July 28 gathering, director Kubzansky, playwright Alfaro and most of the play’s cast were on-hand to schmooze and answer questions.

“Medea,” which was originally produced for the spring religious festival for Dionysos in Athens circa 431 B.C., “is not a play that I’ve ever wanted to direct,” Kubzansky continued. “I could never understand Medea and what makes her tick and why she did the things she did.”

Things like, you know, maternal filicide.

However, MacArthur Fellow Alfaro, the author of “Electricidad” and “Oedipus el Rey,” personalized the story for her (she felt “gut-connected,” in her words) by setting it in East L.A. amid the tightly knit Latino community.

Actually, in this play’s case, Alfaro cracked the nut after some time in Tuscon, Arizona, who had a residency there among some troubled youth, including a young girl who had murdered her own mother after she tried to place a hit on her drug-lord father.

“Usually, I’d live in the town for a year and then I write about the town,” Alfaro said.

An actress who previously worked in Alfaro’s “Electricidad,” Mendoza summed up to the Palisadian-Post Alfaro’s winning attributes as a creator.

“From very early on, I have loved Luis’s sense of family and community,” Mendoza said. “He is a poet with a whip-smart sense of humor.”

“I am interpreting, I am channeling, I am translating these stories from the past into something exciting and contemporary,” Alfaro explained.

Kubzansky now feels super at ease telling this once enervating Euripides enterprise.

“I’m so interested now in their trials and tribulations,” Kubzansky said. “I feel so blessed and privileged and honored to be working with this talented group.”

“Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,” runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. from Sept. 10 through Oct. 3 at the J. Paul Getty Museum Getty Villa’s Outdoor Theater, 17985 Pacific Coast Hwy. Tickets: $40 (Thursdays), $42 (Fridays) and $45 (Saturdays). Call 310-440-7300; visit getty.edu