Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University.

A man after my own heart, Luis Alfaro crafted a play which takes the beautiful, tragic heartbeats of the ancient yet everlasting story of Oedipus the King and transports it into the equally catastrophic world of East LA in our own time.

Oedipus el Rey follows the same winding path as the Greek story with Alfaro’s own clever and appropriate adjustments, leaving the audience cringing with our knowledge and holding our breath as we are still surprised when the unthinkable happens. He truly created the best kind of adaptation, one that explores its own identity while maintaining the integrity that makes these classics still relevant today. What went hand in hand with this brilliance was the expertise directing and staging by Jon Lawrence Rivera at the Theatre @ Boston Court.

Since the development of realism is only a little over a hundred years ago, theatre has been in flux between an objective, clinical “slice of life” view into a private life and a more symbolic, expressionistic, non-literal approach. Though I see the value in both, I have always had a predilection for theatre that is truly theatrical, using symbols, dream sequences or surrealism.

There is no way theatre can do what film can do, so why not embrace the simplicity and rawness that can be offered from a live stage? I am under the firm belief theatre will never die because people will never stop craving that realness, that live energy in front of them. What is “reality” television but a poor excuse to watch people who could surprise you at any moment with their pure livingness?

Jon Lawrence Rivera’s staging of Oedipus el Rey truly gives us the bare minimum, thus allowing the audience to observe and experience the energy, deep sorrow, pain, beauty and love all humans feel, a connection that wound nicely around a script that embraces the modernity of its characters while preserving their universal feel, ultimately conveying the important theme that there is no real difference between any of us.