Tag Archives: Michelle Medina Villalon

“Electricidad” Electra-fies!!

Review: Three Bone Theatre’s Electricidad at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

Maybe by now we’re numbed to the truth. You know how it is: 30 dead, 57,000 acres burned, 18,000 homes and buildings burned to the ground, and 200,000 people evacuated. Not enough problems already in California? Let’s call in masked men from ICE and the National Guard!!

The upheavals out West are almost enough to deflect our attention away from the all-important Jeffrey Epstein files. Los Angeles is on fire! And we shrug it off.

From what I’ve seen so far in Three Bone Theatre’s first two installments of The Greek Trilogy by Luis Alfaro, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles last August and Electricidad now, the plan is to keep the flames burning high and out of control from beginning to end. At peak visceral heat.

Alfaro grew up as a queer Chicano in LA and came of age before Rodney King and the infamous 1992 riots. Electricidad was actually the playwright’s first dip into Sophocles in 2003, six years after he won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. So you might expect this youngest Greek modernization to be Alfaro’s angriest, fieriest, and most rebellious.

You would be right, but watch out: so far, Electricidad is also the funniest.

That can be a problem for director Glynnis O’Donoghue and her powerhouse cast at the intimate JCSU Arts Factory on West Trade. When Electricidad, Alfaro’s reincarnation of Sophocles’ Electra, describes her chola quarter of the LA barrio as the recognized pharmacy of the area, I was able to hear the air-quotes that surround the playwright’s text and laughed out loud.

Portraying the title princess, Melissa Lozada seemed a bit surprised and perturbed at the laughter. But her father, the venerated Agamenón (“El Auggie”), whose corpse lies enshrined in the front yard of Electricidad’s home, was the drug lord of the barrio. Her kingdom, which she plans to somehow usurp from her murderous mother, Clemencia, is built on drugs and community “protection.”

Or as one of the gossipy local Greek Chorus members puts it, “We don’t dial the 911 no more.”

More than in last year’s Mojada, the pretensions of our protagonists are repeatedly mocked and deflated. Ifigenia, E’s younger sister, is now a born-again Christian because she discovered that the meals served at her convent are far better than those she got in jail. Having taken over her abusive husband’s kingdom, Clemencia wants to sell rather than rule. She has Century 21 on speed dial and hopes to move to Pasa-fucking-dena.

In place of the ancient Greek gods, we have the modern monoliths: Target, Sears, 7-Eleven, Payless, and Oprah. Agamenón’s grieving mother, Abuela, exemplifies the warrior chola pride handed down through the generations, boasting that she pulled off her first shoplifting exploits from her baby carriage.

Brooding and vengeful, Electricidad stands apart from her family, even in her religiosity. You won’t find her praying to Jesus or the Blessed Virgin. To her, Auggie’s corpse is a sacred object, defiled by Forest Lawn, which would allow her father’s body to lie in state overnight with nobody watching.

She and Abuela whisked the body to the front yard, where she stands vigil, a squatter on her own property. E prays to her father’s spirit and talks to it, occasionally lifting her prayers to the severed head of ancient Aztec daughter Coyolxuahqui, better known as the moon.

No, Electricidad doesn’t think her devoted vigil, her seething rage, or any of her impassioned ravings are funny. Nor is she looking for a good laugh, even if her fanatical love for her father may be more than a little pathological. So Lozada’s glaring, combustible intensity is Electra, whether it’s Sophocles’, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s, Jean Giraudoux’s, Jean Paul Sartre’s, or Eugene O’Neill’s. The laxity and corruption that surround her only increase Electricidad’s saturnine glow.

And a supremely hopeless mourning it is, for the bloody vengeance she is craving is unseemly for a woman – and Electicidad is as faithful to the old cholo ways as she is to her papá.She doesn’t realize that her brother Orestes, after being exiled to Las Vegas, where dear Clemencia ordered a hit on him, is still alive. His mentor, Niño, has thwarted the hit and is carrying on with his mission to toughen the kid up so he can take over the House of Atridas and continue in the king’s footsteps.

Although Jennifer O’Kelly’s lurid set design and projections combine with Madison King’s lighting to give the impression that LA’s el barrio is ablaze 24-7, the Arts Factory space is too limited to back up the idea that Clemencia’s check from Century 21 will be a huge fortune. It is Isabel Gonzalez as Clemencia who makes the House of Atridas formidable in a towering performance to savor every moment she’s onstage.

Even in the opening scene, as the speechless Electricidad dominates our attention sitting next to the shrine she has fashioned from Agamenón’s shrouded remains, Gonzalez lurks restlessly in the shadows in the corner of the room, a dynamo of nervous energy. The arrogance and majesty only emerge later when she paces the front room, caged in her own castle, chain-smoking, and unable to purge the terror squatting in her front yard.

Coming out to confront her sleek, gimlet-eyed daughter, Clemencia has a robust arsenal of tactics, from sweet cajoling and bribery to fierce, defiant, threatening, screaming, thundering rage. What a pair! For in retelling the fall of the House of Atreus, Alfaro has not only resurrected Agamemnon’s sacrificed daughter, Iphigenia, but he has also blotted out Aegisthus – Clytemnestra’s lover, protector, and partner in crime, ruler of Argos while the original Auggie was out of town, winning the Trojan War.

For feminists and progressives, Clemencia is unquestionably the strongest Clytemnestra of all that have been presented onstage since Aeschylus fathered the Greek rep that has survived the ages. When Gonzalez faces off against Lozada, as she did last week at the VIP dress rehearsal, we can also crown Alfaro’s Clemencia as the best of the Clytemnestras conceived for stage or opera (Hofmannsthal’s script became the libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra).

She certainly stands on higher moral ground than any of her predecessors, and if you hadn’t recognized Gonzalez as the diva of Hispanic actors in the QC until now, your mind will likely be changed by this hot gem. Lozada’s “Electra-fying” debut will stamp the Venezuelan spitfire no less convincingly as this year’s most exciting QC newcomer. Yes, there is spitting in el barrio.

Just don’t overlook the quieter, nuanced magnificence of Eduardo Sanchez in capturing Orestes’ mix of innocence, steely nobility, and self-doubt – prodded along by Luis Medina’s sometimes proud, sometimes slightly exasperated Niño patiently punching and tattooing his pupil into manhood. Sanchez is more than soft enough when we first encounter him to justify his skepticism about filling his father’s shoes and wearing his crown.

Matricide?!? That’s a terrifying prospect when he returns from Vegas to LA and learns what’s what. Even Mom understands his hesitance, calling him “My most sensitive one.”

O’Donoghue was still tinkering with pacing on the night we attended. Too fast and you can miss Alfaro’s choicest quips, especially with Mariana Corrales, Allison Graham, and Marcella Pansini as the Chicano chorus of street sweepers, not the best players in the lineup. Slow it down, and the comedy threatens to take over.

But when it comes to the key moment, that spark-gap instant when Orestes becomes who he was destined to be, O’Donoghue nails it with hardly a single prompt from Alfaro’s script. It’s a kind of magic, a key superpower Alfaro also preserves from ancient times for his Medea in Mojada.

As Orestes returns to Clemencia’s living room, where mamá is smoking and watching TV, she begins chanting: “Find the courage. Find the rage. Find the darkness.” This chant becomes a background incantation as Celemencia deals with the shocking reunion and Orestes copes with the enormity of his mission.

Until Electricidad screams out. It’s as if the live-wire transformer decreed by Alfaro at the top of his script, humming and crackling in the background all evening long, bursts into flame. As if Electricidad is triggering Orestes’ actions by remote control.

There’s only scant proof for my theory about O’Donoghue’s concept. Aside from The Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” specified by name in the playscript, sound designer Neifert Enrique inserts Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” as a perfect foreshadowing. You did not live the ‘70s if you don’t know it.

The pesky and complaisant sister usually assigned to irritate Electra is most often named Chrysothemis, so Michelle Medina Villalon is drawing a fairly thankless role as Ifigenia. But Alfaro perks her up a bit as Ifi really is iffy to the core, trying to get her elder sister and her mom to make peace, let bygones be bygones, and trying out Christianity as an alternative to whatever kept landing her in jail. Still sporting vivid tattoos from her past, Ifi carries around a little statue of the Blessed Virgin as a security object: to pray to, to purify her living, and maybe to mark her territory if she decides to move back permanently.

Villalon also carries around a distinctively blank and traumatized look about her – maybe a prophecy of what Orestes and Electricidad will soon become. The earth here seems to be so scorched that both the sanitation department and the police stay clear. There’s no more likelihood that the siblings will face legal consequences for their crime than Clemencia faced for hers.

As one of the street sweeper gossips tells us, this is the wild, wild ouest. The only repercussions to assail the Atridas family for all their crimes are inward – the pains of guilt, regret, and that mark that has branded our species since the days of Cain. Drugs? Expelled from the equation.

Abuela remembers the good old days, reminiscing with Niño briefly upon his return before luring him to her place. With Banu Villadares embodying the tough and pragmatic Abuela, who didn’t weep at her son’s funeral because it would mar her makeup, we can understand why she is the only person on the planet who can make Electricidad laugh. Or momentarily rescue her from her own darkness.

You just gotta love her indomitable sass. Especially in a world that’s on fire.

Shouldn’t Gardner’s “A Small and Humble Erasure” Be Retitled – and Replayed?

Review: A Small and Humble Erasure at Davidson Community Players

By Perry Tannenbaum

As playwright Tracy Letts knows well, there are unpleasant truths at the heart of American life and the American Dream. “Sometime tonight, when the temperature of your home drops to a specific mark and you hear the heater come on because that’s what you’ve programmed it to do, remember that you live in a cocoon of comfort and safety because a lot of people who came before you weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.”

Those clear-eyed, merciless words were delivered by the Mayor Superba of Big Cherry at the climax of The Minutes, Letts’ unexpectedly savage and sensational 2017 drama. The Metrolina premiere was presented last month at the Armour Street Theatre as Volume 1 of Davidson Community Players’ Sacred Places project. With a no less of an innocuous title, the world premiere of Stephanie Gardner’s A Small and Humble Erasure is completing DCP’s project – with a sacred place that hits closer to home.

Gardner has actually customized her script for Armour Street and for the members of the cast, directed by Michelle Medina Villalon. While Letts located his drama at a fictitious City Hall built on the blood of slaughtered Native Americans, Gardner’s piece reminds us that Theatre Charlotte is built on more sacred ground, over a cemetery consecrated for African American slaves.

And she tells us, naming names, just how this cemetery was “deconsecrated” and who was responsible. Mayor Ben Douglas and numerous councilmen are in the room where it happened, all of them white men from respected Charlotte families: Baxter, Hovis, Albea, and Wilkinson – with mischievous colorblind and gender-blind inroads in Villalon’s casting. Starting with the famed Mayor whose name is perpetuated on the QC’s international airport.

A future councilman, attorney John Small, introduces the motion at a City Council meeting in 1936, nine years after Theatre Charlotte had been founded as the Charlotte Drama League and five years before the Old Queens Road Barn celebrated its housewarming. By this time, Tom Humble had settled into his role as Little Theatre of Charlotte’s artistic director.

So the workings of this Small & Humble alliance give Gardner’s title a clever double entendre. Humble, at least, is haunted by the fact that his new fixture in Charlotte’s cultural life was built on the backs and graves of Southern slaves. Big Cherry, on the other hand, leans into their past desecrations after the truth is painstakingly revealed to them by a rogue councilman. Their actions are sensationally horrifying, while Gardner’s white folk are more decorously rueful.

Of course, there’s considerable satirical bite to Gardner’s concept, above and beyond the casting vengeance she takes on all the benign and virulent segregationists who are culpable for this sacrilege. An African American, Andrew C. Roberts, portrays both Mayor Douglas and plutocrat Harold Dwelle, and Amy Wada, an Asian American, is our narrator!

She brings us into the Myers Park homes of these benefactors, the Dwelles and the Myerses themselves, delving into the petty maneuverings of their estates. These include the hallowed cemetery and the adjoining Cherry neighborhood. Yes, DCP executive director Steve Kaliski & Co. could have easily called their pairing “The Cherry Project.” Interestingly enough, both Cherrys have insulting and racist slurs associated with their names as well as complicit Mayors in their dramas.

Making Amy Wada our personable and slightly stressed narrator is obviously an entertaining choice. But I’m not always aboard with the idea of actors behind her frequently breaking character and interrupting her – perforating and undermining the seriousness of her narrative, threatening to trivialize the history.

Getting Hank West, indisputably one of Charlotte’s best, to play Tom Humble is a similarly two-edged sword. Villalon and Gardner must have been sure that West gave the best audition, and he impeccably balances the Indiana native’s haughty elitism, his ambitions for the Queen Road Barn, and his conscience. But for those of us who have seen West’s work over the last four decades, it’s a bit of a hurdle disliking his Humble in the artist’s worst moments.

Clean-cut with mature Everyman looks, Mark Ariail is a fine complement to West as the conniving Small, the lubricant that connects Humble and Myers Park to the Charlotte City Council. We have a hard time labeling him as evil despite the obvious earmarks. Little Theatre was little, after all, and Queens Road was the closest the fledgling company could hope to get to the QC’s high-priced Uptown real estate.

Gardner seems willing to allow that the upstanding Charlotte citizens of the 1930s were shaped by their times and less eager than Letts to condemn and ridicule them for their actions and customs. But she does provide a second backdrop to the unfolding Small & Humble “erasure”: black folk who set the plutocrats’ tables and black folk who were buried beneath them.

Roberts is neither of these, but he’s useful in Gardner’s concept beyond his key roles as Dwelle and Mayor Douglas. He’s also “new” to the cast, so Wada can be explaining the history – and the colorblind casting – to him as well as us. Lowell Lark, when he removes the enslaved Harvey Foster’s bloody bandage from his head, becomes a somewhat comical Councilman Baxter when the Theatre Charlotte ordinance is passed, returning years and years later to haunt Humble and become part of Queens Road lore. When that happens, it no longer seems amiss that he doesn’t strictly conform with Gardner’s description of him as a 17-year-old when he died.

Myneesha King as Johnsie Foster, the Dwelle family housemaid, gets to be a sometimes-acerbic conscience for the great white benefactors of Myers Park – and she’s pretty sassy toward Amy, so it isn’t a demeaning role. King is also significant the living descendant of the buried and betrayed slave population distilled into the voice and wounded image of Harvey Foster.

Briefly, King can relish returning as Barbara Burke, the first African American to appear in a Little Theatre production in 1970. It’s Wada, though, who points out that this was three years after Humble retired. Then we hear the vanilla quote in our newspaper’s coverage straight from King’s lips: “If the whole world would say people are people and not what color you are, it would be a wonderful place.”

We do get along here in Charlotte, don’t we? Ironically enough, Gardner reminds us that the first play produced at the new Little Theatre, once the gravestones were cleared away, was Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman’s George Washington Slept Here. Talk about a whitewash!

The white women of Myers Park, bless their hearts, are at least ambivalent about what’s going on over at the top of Queens Road. Pam Coble Newcomer as family matriarch Mary Rawlinson Myers insists that the Negro Cemetery should belong to the Cherry community in perpetuity, but has neglected to ensure that her wishes are legally airtight.

Along with King as Johnsie, we empathize with Mary the most, especially since she’s confined to her deathbed. Newcomer is liberated from her bedclothes for two comical turns, becoming Councilman Albea and Little Theatre actor Jack Knell. Jack’s wife, Dorothy Knell, is also in the cast of the first show presented at the new theater in 1941, so Cat Rutledge completes the amusing little gender-blind episode.

Rutledge, like Newcomer, also gets to have fun at City Hall as Councilman Wilkinson, one of our proud city’s banking visionaries. (Is the notorious boulevard named after him? Yup.) She also comes out as perhaps the meanest meanie onstage at Armour Street, jousting with both Mary and Johnsie as Mary Myers Dwelle – or Mary II – as she helps push the Little Theatre initiative through City Council.

Perhaps because she also pushed through the first art museum in the state, The Mint, Myers’ aristocratic daughter is allowed to luxuriate in regrets similar to Humble’s. Aw, cut them some slack, Gardner seems to say. Better to simply mention The Mint, IMHO.

Volume 2 isn’t speckled with shameful or diabolical celebrations like The Minutes, last month’s Volume 1. Nor does it chill us like Mayor Superba’s cynical admonition, cited above. The best Humble can do is “I don’t know how to fix it.” Honest enough. Mary Dwelle is more pragmatic and resolute, asking us “Why should we have to leave town for our culture? We’ll build it here!”

Ninety years later, the QC is teeming with theatre artists who believe Charlotte shouldn’t be the largest city in the country without a regional professional company. They’re still waiting for that same Myers Park/Banktown resolve to lead somewhere.

Maybe Roberts, the newbie to A Small and Humble Erasure, has drawn Gardner’s most devastating line. “Excuse me,” he asks Amy, “am I playing a white guy??”

His disdain and disgust speak volumes.

Needless to say, it was a bit awkward to be driving back home on I-77 through Charlotte after this bold show in Davidson. If DCP’s collaborator, Anne Lambert & Charlotte’s Off-Broadway, could contrive to bring Small and Humble to this side of Lake Norman, it might find a bigger audience at the right place. With the potential of reaching the right audience and getting the right proactive reaction. I’d suggest a peppier title, like The Small & Humble Desecration, when that happens.

Davidson Community Players now performs at three different venues, adding Davidson College and the Cain Center in Cornelius to their portfolio over the years. What do you have, Charlotte?

It’s like this on the QC’s pitiful theatre landscape: Since DCP’s Sacred Places began last month, two modest professional productions have opened in the QC, by CAST and Charlotte Conservatory Theatre – both of them at The Mint Museum. Yeah, that’s how much local theatre building we’ve done in the last 90 years.

“Mojada” Gives the QC a Flaming Taste of Euripides

Review: Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

When Euripides took first place for the first time at the Dionysia Festival, Athens’ five-day playwrights showdown celebrating Dionysius, it was so long ago that theatre scholars aren’t sure whether he won an ivy wreath or a goat. Ten years later, when his Medea took third place, we can’t say what the Greek master took home as a reward. It wasn’t gold or bronze, but Olympic champions and runners-up back then didn’t win medals, either. Nor can anyone remember the titles of the tragedies that finished ahead of Euripides’ masterwork.

Now that Luis Alfaro’s Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles has premiered in an excellent Three Bone Theatre production at the Arts Factory, we can say – 2455 years and five months later – that we are a giant step closer to seeing a premiere of Euripides’ white-hot spectacle in Charlotte. Until now, the closest approach of the charismatic adventurer Jason and his sorceress consort Medea to the Queen City was a 2004 Gardner-Webb U production in Boiling Springs.

That production, one might presume, came in the wake of the sensational 2003 Broadway revival of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. But was there also a connection between that Media and Alfaro’s?

Could be! For the Broadway sizzler also transported Euripides’ hellcat to Los Angeles. But there’s also a huge difference: Shaw’s Medea was a Hollywood superstar who capriciously craved a Garbo-like solitude. Alfaro’s is a mojada, or wetback, who needs to lay low because she’s an illegal – and mostly because, during their treacherous migration from Mexico, she suffered far more severe trauma than the rest of her family and their longtime viejita, Tita, who is always seething over the indignity of being considered a “housekeeper” in America.

She considers herself a curandera, a healer, so she tracks with the Nurse in Euripides’ tragedy. After winning the 1948 Tony Award for Medea – and recreating the role for a 1959 TV movie – Judith Anderson was content in 1982 to take on the role of the Nurse in another Broadway revival, earning a second Tony Award nomination with the same Robinson Jeffers adaptation.

So you can expect Banu Valladares as Tita, Christian Serna as Hason, and Sonia Rosales McLoed as Medea all to have potent roles to play in Alfaro’s explosive retelling. Unlike Euripides, Alfaro flashes back to the treacherous journey that brought Hason and Medea to the Rio Grande, with enough hardships, suffering, and trauma to suggest a parallel to the Middle Passage from Africa. And of course, Medea’s barrio lifestyle also tracks with Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” in Harlem – both of them pulsating toward an explosion.

Alfaro shakes up Euripides’ cast as well, replacing both kings, Creon and Aegeus – and the unnamed, offstage daughter Creon expects Jason to marry – with the sassy, bossy Armida, Hason’s employer and benefactor. We might also say that Alfaro has replaced the Euripides’ Chorus of Corinthian Women with Josefina, a bread-peddling gossip making her daily rounds.

Confronted with a rich mixture of Spanish and English, spoken with authentic Hispanic accents by an all-Latine cast, we may feel as disoriented in this Chicano world as Hason’s family are in LA. Seeing a quiet Medea, burdened by an oppressive workload and timidly tethering herself to her sewing machine, we further struggle to connect Alfaro’s protagonist with Euripides’. Back in Corinth, the royal Medea was outraged, suicidal, and wildly vengeful from the moment she first appeared, a volatile dynamo of shifting, fiery emotions.

Since we come into Alfaro’s story a little earlier, it will take a little while for his tragedy to overlap the Greek’s, even if you read it the night before. And if, like me, it’s been over 20 years since you’ve seen the work live or read a translation, you may miss some of what Alfaro has preserved from Euripides’ telling. For Euripides, it wasn’t such a big deal that Jason and Medea were immigrants, but they were. For me, I hardly noticed that Jason and Medea weren’t legally married, but they weren’t.

For Alfaro, these are central plot points. Just don’t think he’s changing those parts of the story. It’s really brilliant how they’re elevated to top-of-mind when we watch Mojada at the Arts Factory. Complementing their all-Latine cast, most of whom are making their first appearances with Three Bone, are directors Carlosalexis Cruz and Michelle Medina Villalon, also in their Three Bone debuts. They don’t always listen to their players with helpful Yankee or Dixie ears, but they deftly quicken the heartbeat of this drama as it climaxes.

More importantly, when they reach the spectacular ending, what they concoct – with Jennifer Obando Carter’s most unforgettable costume design – hits the spot. We could feel that viscerally on opening night.

Obviously, Latine theatre wants to happen in the Queen City. With Three Bone committed to producing Alfaro’s complete Greek Trilogy, Electricidad next August and Oedipus El Rey slated for 2026, it’shappening.

Because Alfaro is messing with both the story and Euripides’ character, those who know the Medea myth can experience the suspense at nearly the same high intensity as audience members who have never come across this Mom-of-the-century before, in Greece or in this LA rewrite. Over and over, as memories of the Euripides’ came flooding on me from past encounters with the live Shaw, the TV Anderson, and the text, I found myself wondering, Is he really going all the way?

After all, part of the reason Euripides’ Medea hasn’t played in Charlotte for at least the 37 years that I’ve been on the beat could be that Queen City theatre companies were protecting us from its full barbaric force. Could be some blowback in Bank Town.

Thanks in large measure to the harrowing flashback sequence, McLoed is able to traverse the wide gulf between the semi-catatonic Medea we confronted at the beginning of the evening and the flaming red raptor we see at the end. That’s Medea!? I found myself wondering during Scene 1, so the development arc from there is nothing less than astonishing. There’s a haunting connection between the catatonia we see at the beginning and the vengeful glare that comes some 90 minutes later. She’s actually relatable most of the time!

Precisely because this LA Medea lacks the fire and wicked glamour of her Corinthian counterpart in the early scenes, we can effortlessly empathize with Serna’s ambitious Hason as he pursues the American Dream. She won’t leave the house! Family outings with their son cannot happen, she’s too traumatized for sex even when she’s in the mood, and. He wants to get ahead while his Medea is a poster girl for inertia.

And considering the huge difference between an immigrant’s status in modern-day America and his relative safety in ancient Corinth, Hason has many pragmatic reasons to accept the predatory Armida’s business and marriage proposals, no matter how much he may still love Medea. Giving us earlier access to the story – before the breakup – not only allows Alfaro to add fuel to the drama, it allows him to show us that there is fault on both sides.

Serna’s performance isn’t quite as wide-ranging as McLoed’s, but it is no less nuanced, for he is navigating this new American world and trying to provide for his family’s future. We see that he’s a far better parent to his son, Acan, than Medea, and it’s not just because he kicks a soccer ball around with him in the front yard. Citizenship for him, no matter how heartlessly he betrays Medea, will mean citizenship for the boy.

In her venomous cameo, delivered with a wondrous mix of elegance and malignity, Marianna Corrales is magnificently resistible as Armida, Hasan’s childless employer and Medea’s implacable landlord. Hard to say whether Armida wants Acan as a son more than she wants Hasan as a husband, but with knowledge of Medea’s immigrant and marital status, she knows she is invincible and will have her way. Corrales is cool. Ice.

Alfaro not only gives Leo Torres more to say and do in his story as Acan than any of Jason’s children have ever had before, he makes him a key part of the tale. Torres will not only tell his mom about visiting Armida’s swank house with Dad, he will also – huge new dramatic irony – suggest that she make the rich lady a dress.

Further igniting Medea’s suspicions and jealousy is Isabella Gonzalez as Josefina, bringing her signature vitality along with her cartful of bread as she shares gossip with Tita. Yet she is also eager to make friends with Medea, especially if a certain amount of freebie loaves will convince the artful seamstress to make her a smashing new outfit. So it makes sense, out of friendship, that she tells Medea what the buzz is around town about Hason and Armida.

We never learn how long Hason has actually been married – or how far custody proceedings have gone – when Medea gets the newsflash. This point in Alfaro’s LA comes late in the drama, but in Corinth all this has happened before we first see the sorceress. No wonder the rest of the evening was such a feverish whirl.

In hindsight, after dipping back into the original 431 B.C. playscript, methinks it was far crueller that Alfaro’s Medea sends Tita – instead of Jason and the child – to deliver her bridal gift. Cruel as it is to make the viejita a witness, it gives Valladares a monologue that even Judith Anderson would have loved to sink her teeth into. As the eternally griping Tita, Valladares seems to hate everybody, beginning with us, whom she addresses directly after Alfaro’s incantatory opening.

But she has crossed rivers, faced outlaws and starvation, because of her loyalty to Medea, the one person she adores. And now Medea sends her off with a giftbox to Armida and tells her that she herself is a second gift for Hason’s benefactor. Discarded like an old rag!

Plenty of steam to work with. Valladares does not misfire. Nor does McLoed, though we hear an ominous helicopter overhead.