Review: In Mojada, Immigration Is an Ill-Fitting Costume for a Modern-Day Medea

The play reduces Medea’s decisions to an act of madness, adding little to our understanding of the Medea mythos.

Mojada
Photo: Joan Marcus

Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, a modern-day adaptation of Euripedes’s Medea, begins and ends with scenes of Medea’s (Sabina Zúñiga Varela) life in a foreign country, prior to the woman murdering her own child. An argument can be made that, in this context, Medea’s actions are a direct result of the trauma she sustained while making the arduous crossing from Zamora, in the Mexican state of Michoacan, to Corona, Queens. But Alfaro, who once found success mirroring ancient tragedy in a contemporary Latinx moment with Oedipus El Rey, doesn’t convincingly make that connection. The contextual changes he makes to the circumstances of and relationship between Medea and Jason (Alex Hernandez) reduce Medea’s decisions to an act of madness, adding little to our understanding of the Medea mythos.

In Mojada, Medea and Jason, who aren’t technically married, must live in hiding. America’s a far less welcoming country than ancient Corinth, which also gives a new context to Jason’s decision to marry an American citizen. He expresses shame over trading sex with Pilar (Ada Maris), his wealthy developer boss, for the right to stay in one of her many properties and, eventually, for citizenship through marriage. He’s protecting himself and his son, Acan (Benjamin Luis McCracken), not to mention gaining legal employment for Tita (Socorro Santiago), the loyal servant who followed the family from Mexico. His entire “crime”—sleeping with another woman—is contextualized as a necessary transaction, and the play backs him up, both in its depiction of the family’s precarious situation, and in the fact that Pilar herself, a Cuban immigrant, achieved her wealth and success by once marrying a rich American.

In Greek mythology, Medea enabled Jason and his crew of Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. He owed his success to her, and she rejected her father’s kingdom to relocate to a new country with him. Mojada’s version of Medea is far less empowered and helpful; in truth, it’s hard to see why she and Jason are together at all, since they seem to want entirely different things for themselves and their son. Jason embraces America, taking Acan to Coney Island and encouraging him to use American words like “dad” instead of “papi.” Conversely, Medea, who’s shown on multiple occasions clearing her mind with sewing and ritual prayer, not only stubbornly refuses any sort of cultural assimilation, but bristles at others’ show of it.

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Throughout Mojada, Alfaro provides reasons for why Medea is closed off from Jason and the world: When she tries to be intimate with him, she’s reminded of her rape, and when she attempts to leave their home, she’s overwhelmed by the cacophony of sounds emanating from her bustling section of Corona. These traumas are real, and a tragic result of the price she continues to pay for having crossed into America, but Alfaro so briefly addresses them that they come across as thin excuses with which to make the agoraphobic Medea so reliant on others. In the end, neither her suffering nor her unauthorized status hold her back as much as the plot of Medea: She has to kill Pilar and Acan because that’s how the story goes.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set—the backyard of a rundown two-story house—suggests both shelter and a place of danger, as if this family’s American dream might collapse at any moment. And Haydee Zelideth’s costuming points to an insidious erasure at work in the characters’ lives. Medea is a talented seamstress, but because she has no papers, she must standardize her work and cheaply sell it to middlemen. It’s further frustrating to her that while she proudly wears a plain white dress, her family begins to cast off the clothing they brought to America, with Acan trading in a Mexican jersey for an American one, and Jason happily upgrading to a pair of expensive boots offered to him by Pilar. Medea tries to foreground her culture, adding a colorful flourish to her attire before Jason introduces her to Pilar, but she never commands the focus of the room, and the rest of the cast’s clothing only grows more casual and everyday. These subtle elements do far more to give weight to Medea’s fears of being culturally erased than does blunt declamatory dialogue like: “That’s the problem with this country, you can get everything you want, but then you spend the rest of your life fighting to keep it.”

That Medea feels like a costume worn by Mojada to justify its existence becomes apparent with how easily the Medea-related content is cast off midway through the play. Twice, Alfaro shifts from active dialogue to passive monologues in which Medea recounts how her family crossed the American border. Instead of showing the ugly realities of death, dehydration, rape, and ICE that they encountered along the way, Alfaro uses terse poetry (“I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I am dead inside.”) and stale metaphor (“She makes a concoction. I drink it. It kills the soldier inside me.”) that keeps these things at a comfortable distance.

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Mojada, under Chay Yew’s direction, attempts to make this recitation more direct by projecting images of Medea’s family’s journey onto the wall of their home. But these well-intended images of a nighttime desert, stretches of highway, Port Authority, could be snapshots from any family’s memories of travel; they’re so generic that they don’t specifically speak to the arduousness, the horror, of Medea and Jason’s journey to the States.

Mojada is at its most specific and resonant when it isn’t focusing on Medea, but on Luisa (Vanessa Aspillaga), a garrulous Puerto Rican who’s returned to America in the wake of Hurricane Maria, driven to succeed at any cost. In her case, this means entrepreneurially operating a churro cart (“Cops eat free”), despite the cultural scorn from her neighbors, and secondarily by adopting a new name, Lulu, so that she might be more appealing to hipsters. A character with no corollary in Euripedes’s play, she’s free to simply exist and tell her story, which she does, and in such a comic, rapid-fire fashion that when she abruptly starts to sob over her husband’s work-related back ailments and their lack of energy to have a kid, it may catch you off-guard. There’s a spark of humanity here that the rest of Mojada, beholden both to Medea and the Big Idea of immigration, is otherwise unable to ignite.

Luisa is actively hustling, and she details the steps and compromises she’s going to take to get the future she wants. Medea is more passive, making no effort to break out of her one-woman sweatshop. Alfaro is so fixated on having her make political pronouncements—“They can never build a wall big enough. But they will always try”—that she becomes nothing more than a mouthpiece, which is why her sudden and violent pivot feels so disproportionate. Medea, both the character and the play, create unearned drama for Mojada, moments that wrongly wrest focus away from thoughts of immigration. For a more effective classical tragedy, simply watch the news, with its raw images, wailing interviews, and chorus of pundits.

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Mojada is now playing through Sunday, August 11 at the Public’s LuEsther Hall.

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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