DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

When I first read Luis Alfaro's Mojada, what struck me wasn't just its craft — the way he takes Euripides' Medea, twenty-five centuries old, and resets it in a sewing room in Los Angeles without losing a beat of the original's terror — it was how quietly it insists that myth is still being written, right now, in the lives of people crossing a river or a desert to build something new. Alfaro doesn't ask us to pity Medea. He asks us to understand her: a woman who survived unspeakable violence to get here, who loves fiercely, who is discarded by the very dream she risked everything for. That is not ancient history. That is this morning's news, told with the weight and inevitability of tragedy.

I wanted to direct this play now because it refuses to let immigration remain an abstraction — a policy debate, a statistic, a talking point. It hands the audience a family: a mother, a child, a husband chasing assimilation at the cost of his own soul, a community of women holding each other up in a language and a kitchen that remind them who they are. It is unflinching about what the journey costs and unsentimental about what "belonging" actually requires. In a moment when so much public conversation about immigration flattens people into categories, Mojada restores them to full, contradictory, human scale.

What has made this production most meaningful to me, though, is who is telling it. This cast is largely made up of young Mexican and Mexican American actors bringing their own families' histories, languages, and instincts to a story that is, in many ways, theirs before it is ever a script. I have watched students who began rehearsals unsure of their own voices find ferocity, tenderness, and control they didn't know they had — wrestling honestly with a story about betrayal, survival, and identity, and coming out the other side more articulate about who they are and where they come from. Their commitment has not been an exercise in acting. It has been an act of claiming — of insisting that these stories, their stories, belong on our stage and deserve to be told with the full seriousness of classical tragedy.

I'm deeply proud of what this company has built together. I hope you leave the theater the way I left that first read: shaken, a little unsettled, and unable to look away from what it means to survive.