Mojada Kills The Questions

Armida has a proposition for the family in front of her. She wants to make Hason, who already works for her, more of a business partner. Hason is game. He’s been working for this opportunity for a while now. Acan, his son, is also ready. He’s been getting used to his life in Los Angeles. But Medea, Acan’s mother, isn’t so sure. She worries about what Hason may be giving up. She and Tita, the family’s matron, worry that maybe Armida’s designs on Hason extend past the professional. In that moment, there is a sense that the family, which has held together through several hardships, might just start coming back. And Medea doesn’t know what to do.

Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles — written by Luis Alfaro, directed by Laurie Woolery, and running now at Yale Repertory Theatre through April 1 — tells the story of Medea, Hason, Acan, and Tita, a family that immigrates from rural Mexico to Los Angeles in search of a better life. The place they have left is tense. Along the way, as we learn, they suffer violence. When they get to Los Angeles, Medea and Tita try to hold on to as much of the culture they came from as they can. Hason, meanwhile, jumps headlong into assimilation, seeing it as the only way to unlock the financial opportunities in front of him. This makes him cross paths with Armida, who makes him her right-hand man in her real estate business and maybe something more. Acan — Medea’s and Hason’s son — is caught in the middle. Which way does he want to go?

As the subtitle of the play suggests, Mojada is based on the Greek myth (and Euripides play based on the story) of Medea, an enchantress who — major spoilers ahead — marries Jason (of Argonauts fame) only to be thrown over when Jason marries Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. In addition, Creon announces that he plans to send Medea into exile to avoid awkwardness with his family. Her position in society suddenly fragile, Medea takes her revenge first by fatally poisoning Glauce and Creon, and next by killing her own two sons to hurt Jason, their father. In Euripides’s tragedy, when Jason discovers what Medea has done, they have a final confrontation, as Medea ascends into the sky.

“Father Zeus knows well all I have done for thee, and the treatment thou hast given me,” Medea says. ​“Yet thou wert not ordained to scorn my love and lead a life of joy in mockery of me, nor was thy royal bride nor Creon, who gave thee a second wife, to thrust me from this land and rue it not.… I in turn have wrung thy heart, as well I might.”

“Thou, too, art grieved thyself, and sharest in my sorrow,” Jason replies.

“Be well assured I am; but it relieves my pain to know thou canst not mock at me,” Medea says.

“O my children, how vile a mother ye have found!” Jason laments. But Medea won’t let him off the hook. ​“My sons, your father’s feeble lust has been your ruin!” she laments in return.

“ ​‘Twas not my hand, at any rate, that slew them,” Jason says. But Medea has a comeback for that, too: ​“No,” she says, ​“but thy foul treatment of me, and thy new marriage.”

The story of Medea has persisted since the time of the ancient Greeks, and the story retains its power in modern contexts. She has been interpreted as suffering from postpartum depression and psychosis. She has also been treated as a feminist icon, kicking back against the patriarchy. Much of that power — even when Euripides was writing about her — derives from her status as myth. She exists in a milieu in which her husband fights monsters, and in which another figure journeys into the underworld to try to raise his beloved from the dead through song, and another gouges out his own eyes after killing his father and sleeping with his mother. 

Greek myths are, in short, about some very extreme behavior. In the myths, that behavior can help clarify questions — about fate versus free will, circumstance and responsibility, power, loyalty, betrayal. But it remains that, placed in the real world that we live in, the behavior is shockingly violent, violent enough to strain credulity if not handled deftly enough. This makes mixing the myths with real life a tricky proposition, and one that, in the end, Mojada doesn’t really pull off.

As is almost always the case at Yale Rep, working in the play’s favor is the extremely strong cast. As Medea, Camila Moreno conveys her character’s strength and brokenness, and measures out her growing emotions expertly to take us with her as her rage and panic mount over her narrowing options. Alejandro Hernández likewise peels back the amiable surface of Hason to reveal a weaker man, one who offers, first, flimsy justifications for his behavior, and then defiance. Romar Fernandez is a a bolt of energy onstage as Acan, their doomed son, even as he traces his character’s move from Mexican to American culture. Mónica Sánchez, whose Armida is something of a blend of Glauce and Creon, embodies the role of powerful seducer while making space for her character to dispense the occasional flash of practical wisdom. Her nuanced performance prevents Armida from simply being a villain. Alma Martinez gives the grandmotherly Tita the sharp edge the character needs, making her both nurturing and fierce. 

The set itself (Marcelo Martínez García, set designer) also aids in the storytelling, as the bungalow Medea and her family live in takes center stage even as it appears to be a ghost of its former self, and the towering structures around it echo both the height of the infamous U.S.-Mexico border fence and the skyscrapers of downtown L.A. They help make the audience feel the stifling ambitions of some of the characters and the multiple oppressions they face from the society they’re living in.

But all of those factors working for the play can’t smooth over the rough edges of the play itself, where the realism that the story insists on rubs up awkwardly against the symbolism it is clearly reaching for. In the world of the play, Medea is a woman of flesh and blood, who has been through a lot and is now trying to get by, raising Acan and supplementing the family income through tailoring and dressmaking. But again and again, the characters in the play tell Medea that she is their connection to their roots, to traditional Mexican culture, that she embodies the land they came from. We know how important family values and children are to that.

So what does it mean when Medea kills her child? If you don’t know the story of Medea already (and many in the audience the night this reporter attended seemed not to, judging from the chatter leaving the theater), there is very little in the script that prepares you for the violence she commits. It’s not so much shocking as that it seems entirely out of character. The Medea of mythology plots her revenge; defiant and calculating, she knows what she’s doing when she does it. But the Medea of Mojada is not a vengeful person for the first two-thirds of the play; as she appears in the script, her actions seem more the result of desperation, finally tipping over, possibly, into temporary insanity. But what does that mean for Medea’s role as bearer of tradition, as connection to the Mexican past? 

Some of the best works of art of the 20th century have created narratives that work on both a realistic and a symbolic level. Joyce’s Ulysses is both a story about three people adrift in Dublin and a retelling of the Odyssey. Joyce makes it work, in part, by turning the real violence in the symbolic tale into metaphorical violence in his realistic setting. Instead of a fight to the death, it’s an argument about politics. Instead of a slaughter of a roomful of suitors, it’s a hop over a fence. August Wilson employs the same balance in several of his plays. In Fences, Troy is both just a former baseball player and something of a mythic figure in the neighborhood. There’s literally a Gabriel with a horn in the play, but his otherworldly acts aren’t overtly so. The blending is what gives it its power, but crucially, when the Gabriel in Fences blows his horn, something huge and ineffable has happened, has been lost, but the world doesn’t literally end.

Other great works have used extreme violence to sharpen the inquiry they are making, but when they do, the violence is the origin of the story, the driver, not the final act. A mother killing her child lies at the heart of Toni Morrison’s Beloved — which also works brilliantly at literal and symbolic levels — but Morrison knows the act is horrific enough that she makes the exploration of its motives and its traumatic, lingering fallout the subject of the entire book. Likewise, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora begins with an act of violence, and irreparable damage, that sets into motion an excoriating view of U.S. history, race, and gender relations; in many ways, in our current political climate, Corregidora is the book we’re still not ready to talk about yet. Morrison and Jones use the violence to ask questions; in Mojada, the violence feels much like the answer to them.

Somewhere in the subjunctive world of the versions of Mojada that could have been, there is a version that swaps the literal murder of three people for something more metaphorical. Medea perhaps manages to take something from them that they can’t get back, or perhaps simply by her absence, the characters realize they have lost something, that a connection has been severed and can’t be mended. Perhaps, in the final scene, Acan, now a thorough product of the United States, feels something has died in him, and is trying without success to reclaim something of his heritage and can’t do it. He finds his mother’s sewing machine, tries to use it but doesn’t know how, and it slices open his finger. That’s violence enough to activate the questions the play is asking, about what’s gained and what’s lost in the turmoil of immigration and assimilation. Are the material gains worth the cost in the cultural and moral harm you can inflict, on family, friends, and yourself?

These are vital questions that rely on Medea, as both a character in the play and a symbol of land, culture, and tradition, to keep them buzzing. In the way Mojada presents Medea to us, when she commits her violence, breaking her character, those questions suddenly flatten out, tipping the play’s argument toward the people who are leaving it all behind; sure, they have lost their roots, and sacrificed their morals to make money, but at least they don’t kill their kids.

Perhaps that’s what the playwright intended. Maybe in the end Mojada is actually a sharp rebuke of the violence and patriarchy within traditional Mexican society, like Roberto Bolaño’s stunning 2666, and specifically The Part About the Crimes, which dives into the killings of hundreds of women in a thinly-fictionalized Ciudad Juárez (which actually happened and continues to happen) and the inability of the police to find a perpetrator. But as it’s not the main focus of the play, it’s hard to say. This is in part because, unlike Euripides, the playwright in Mojada doesn’t give Medea the chance to articulate her motivations, to herself, to Hason, or to the audience.

Mojada ends with a gloriously surreal moment, as the Medea of Los Angeles ascends into the sky, in the form of a bird that, we are told, is the symbol of the place the characters are from. It seems telling, though, that instead of a final verbal fight between Medea and Hason that clarifies Medea’s motivations, Medea gives us bird calls. They are chillingly effective as drama. They’re also unintelligible.

Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles runs at University Theatre, 222 York St., through April 1. Visit Yale Repertory Theatre’s website for tickets and more information.