 And a note that today's event is being live streamed by a HowlRound TV. Thank you HowlRound for hosting this. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Tiffany Ana Lopez. Dr. Lopez is OSF production dramaturg for Luis Alfaro's Mahada on Madea in Los Angeles, directed by Juliette Carrillo. She recently joined the Arizona State University as director of the School of Film, Dance and Theater. And professor of theater and the Herper Institute for Design and the Arts. She has over 20 years of experience as a community-engaged scholar and artist, working with such theaters as the Mark Taper Forum, Cornerstone Theater Company, and the Culver Center for the Arts. She is also a founding member of the Latino-Latina Theater Alliance. Today's conversation is titled, The Past is Always Present, Luis Alfaro as Citizen Artist. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Tiffany Ana Lopez. With all of you this afternoon and to have the opportunity to share about Luis Alfaro and his work in this particular play, I want to give proper salutation and greeting and thank you to HowlRound. We'll be broadcasting live with our National Theater Commons, so it's wonderful. Our conversation today will go out into the world for others to join us. And I also want to talk about some historic things around the play that I think are important for us to spotlight. One is, this is the really historic moment at OSF in that they have four plays opening. Julius Caesar, Henry Part One, Shakespeare in Love, and Mojada. And they all feature Latino actors as leads in the cast, which it's extraordinary to see that moment here. And I also want to give props to OSF. You could see these red signs all around the campus talking about what it means to make theater for everyone. What it means to truly be inclusive. And this is also a historical moment in which OSF's company, 60% of the company now represent diversity, inclusion, and excellence. In a very visible way. So when you go into the theater, I think the everyone on stage is really representing everyone in the public sphere. I think about grandparents seeing it with their grandchildren and just the intergenerational excitement about who are the storytellers on stage here at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. So those are some things I really want us to think about as we launch into this conversation today. Because Mojada is one of the signature plays opening the season that has deep cultural specificity and its focus on the storytelling and the lives of immigrants in Los Angeles. I think following Luisa Falls work for nearly 30 years. We cannot quite put our finger on exactly where we met, but it was sometime in the late 80s and early 90s when I was in graduate school and following his work as an artist. He holds a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and an Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as a theater artist committed to community engagement. It's the kind of work he's been doing for over three decades. Mojada is the recipient of a 2016 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Best New Play Award and a 2013 Jefferson Best New Play Award. And it's an extraordinary story that uses Greek mythology to look at the current moment and a woman who leaves her homeland and comes with her family and what are the different crises that emerge. My following of Luisa Falls work is born from my interest in how theater artists use their work to stage conversations about violence and trauma. By bringing audiences together to bear witness to live storytelling theater is very particular as an art form because it recovers what violence seeks to destroy. Violence seeks to destroy a sense of presence that you don't matter. It seeks to destroy voice that the perpetrators voice whether they're institutional perpetrators or individual perpetrators that they are going to squelch your voice. And that through those things that would have happened to you and to your people that they don't matter because they're without witness. Trauma is defined as the unspeakable. Literally we are traumatized because we lack an ability or in a language to talk about what's happened to us. And things are traumatic because they don't make sense to us in the larger story of our lives. This is why we process and repeat stories over and over again because we're on a quest to try to make sense of them to put them into stories so that they're no longer unspeakable. And theater I think is a very important art form in assisting in the healing of trauma because it gives us a narrative anchor. It gives us a framework for the story and helps us explore violent events. It recuperates presence because you are we're all together. It assembles us not just as an audience but as witnesses or bearing witness and the actors on the stage who either perhaps they're telling their own stories. But when they're engaged in fictional storytelling they are telling someone's story by proxy. They are taking us out of the shadows of things that are silent and have no testimony giving testimony. They're giving witness. They're helping people see that they're not alone. But most importantly they're putting things in a framework of storytelling so that we can take things that are private and traumatic and make them public so that they become legible and not no longer private. But given to us to make a decision when we leave the theater how are we going to participate in change. Do we want to be part of what we've just seen on stage or do we want to help in ending the cycle of violence that we've seen depicted on stage. So theater is a very active and provocative realm for talking about stories of trauma and violence. How many here have seen Mojada already? I've seen the play. Wonderful. And how many of you are going to see it today? And how many of you are going to see it later in the season? Wonderful. So I'm going to be very, very careful about giving no plots spoilers but at the same time speaking as specifically as I possibly can about what I think is important to know about the back work and the play. But also things that we might think about together when we see the work and that you might take forward to talk about with your students or your friends or one another this afternoon. Jaisal Fahal uses the term citizen artist to talk about his commitment to telling stories that are artistically rich and grounded in community. The way that he creates work is he'll travel the nation and he'll embed himself in a community. So he will go and interview people. He'll conduct workshops. He'll be there for residency time and read and find his own personal sources of inspiration. But his largest sources of information are thinking about historical events, thinking about his own memories and thinking about the stories that he's sharing with the particular communities that he visits. And Mojada was born out of that kind of methodology. Luis has been here. He'll be here. His third year will be 2019 but he is a noted RSF Mellon artist in residence here and that means this is his artistic home from 2016 to 2019. So Mojada, the building of Mojada here, even though it's evolved from previous incarnations in San Francisco told as Buhá in Chicago at Victory Gardens. They have the title Mojada. And then last year it was that Eddie Villa in Los Angeles also in the title Mojada. Each of those places, each of the stories that he's exchanged in, the actors that he's worked with, the conversations he's had. They've helped him evolve the work. So this is an extraordinary production because it has a lot to do with his time here and thinking about the community, the relationship between the artistic community here. But also the way history of immigration is very important for us to talk about in this particular location of Ashland, Oregon. Luis has written many, many, many works. We don't find all of them listed in the program. There's two source materials to look at, thinking to gain information and quotes from Luis as well as a cast. One is the play bill. There's information here from Juliet Carillo, the director of the play. And I'm going to talk about the vision that she brings to the work. But there's also the dramaturgy notes, windows into Mojada, Medea in Los Angeles. I served as production dramaturg. And so these are notes that I wrote to help us think about the present moment and the immigration politics in the current time. Because when the play was commissioned over a year ago, who would have predicted the resonance the work would have in this particular moment? I would say all of the four opening plays of the season, looking at Julius Caesar, working at Henry, even thinking about Shakespeare in love, about our need to have an anchor like that with these other big stories that are being told. It's extraordinary the moment we're in, thinking about the relevance of these works to grappling with our current contemporary political climate. There's also as a source guide, illuminations. And when you go online, there's excerpts from this. When you go to buy tickets, it's a resource guide that you can download excerpts from in PDF. But it's also, I believe, available for purchase. And it has all of the dramaturgical research that was brought to thinking about the play. So I encourage you to look at those things. You get a sense of the range of Alfaro's work about the interviews that he did in building the play. But I want to give you a context for Mojave. In light of the three Greek adaptations Luis Alfaro has written and why is Luis Alfaro, as somebody really committed to telling stories about Los Angeles, about the Latino community, doing with the template of Greek plays for adaptation. A lot of it has to do with how relevant Greek tragedy is to thinking about our modern world. And Greek tragedy isn't all about the tragic or the dramatic. Greek plays have a lot of humor embedded in them. And so when you see Mojave, all of the first half of the play is driven by incredibly rich, culturally specific, and I would say universal forms of humor. And the cultural specificity of it, I think what's beautiful about humor is it pulls us into other people's lives. It makes us feel really connected to see how do people find joy and sometimes very dark forms of humor to survive circumstances. If we don't have humor, it's very hard to endure in this world and grow without really being able to laugh at our circumstances or to find little moments of glue with others. But the play also, because it's a Greek tragedy, and Medea has moments that turn looking into very, very perilous moments and issues, and particularly about a story that deals with infanticide, with betrayal, with being cast off, with being labeled not just as an other, but in the original story as a witch, as somebody who's here to do harm. These are all very, very potent parts of the original Medea myth to bring forward to thinking about a play that deals with immigration. With Alfares Greek adaptations, he's also using all of them to explore the relationship between immigration and cultural trauma in America, especially around the American dream. And I would say in this moment, we've gone through economic upheaval in this country. We have a history of all kinds of stories of violence in immigration. I believe that part of addressing our humanity as a collective people is that we have to address our stories of violence and trauma. We talk about the internment, we talk about reservations, we talk about the Holocaust. These are all signal points of trauma in our histories of the people that we address them, because of course we want to learn and not duplicate history, and we want to become mindful of what it is that must be addressed and how we define ourselves as a nation and as a community of people. But these are also stories of trauma, legacies of trauma. And when you look at the violence people have weathered and the trauma they have survived, that's a way of acknowledging humanity. And for Latinos in the United States, the immigration story and immigration histories have not yet been fully positioned as histories of violence and trauma. And if we look at the public discourse around immigration, there's villainization, there's otherness, there's a visual representation that positions people as monstrous, as mechanized, as criminalized, all of those things for looking at people's humanity. I think the Medea myth, looking at how she was constructed as a witch, somebody who came from another place who was coming in to do incredible harm, those are all very potent invitations for us to dig in deep about our cultural moment and thinking about issues of immigration. I want to take a moment and share with you about the two Greek adaptations we so far did prior to Mojada, Medea, and Los Angeles. With Electricidad, Alfaro used the Electra myth to look at the relationship between a young female teen yearning to connect with her father despite a family history of poverty, gangs, and incarceration. And this adaptation of the Greek myth was inspired by a young female gang member who shared with Luis Alfaro her story of working to reinvent herself after murdering her mother for having put out a hit on her father. Luis heard this story and he immediately was drawn to thinking about the Electra myth and wanted to explore what was this young girl's life, but not just as a separate story, but how is it a human story, a historical story about this young child grown into an adult trying to find her way in her family history and reinvent herself? So this is the way he used the Electra myth in his first Greek adaptation, Electricidad. His second Greek adaptation is Oedipus L. Ray, and this was inspired by a conversation Luis had during a residency with a recently released male inmate who had spent nearly the entirety of his 16 years of incarceration in solitary confinement. And Luis was in talking with him, thinking about the fact that this man had entered prison barely outside of his teenage years. He had gone in a boy and come out as an adult without touch, without connectedness to his parents, and living in solitary confinement in a state of incarceration. The play looked at the need for family, but it also looked at the residues of what prison writer Lumia Abu Jamal calls father hunger. What is happening with men in our community and the way that he looked at women in our community in Electricidad? What is happening with the young men in our community who are being routed in record numbers into the prison system? And what will happen when they come out if they don't have that connectedness, the physical love, the emotional connectedness with family and community? So Luis used the Oedipus mythology to explore that in the Oedipus L. Ray. To talk about Mojave, we have a young cast member, JJ, who is Akan, a young boy in Mojave. He's an extraordinary young actor, and I'm going to share with you some of his insights because he came to the United States with his parents. He immigrated with a Spanish speaker. He went to kindergarten to speak Spanish, and he experienced what he called a politicized form of bullying, where he thought, oh, I'm going to kindergarten in the United States. I'm going to learn to speak English. And the children in his kindergarten, and this is just three years ago, three to five years ago, the children in his kindergarten said, go back to where you came from. Learn English. So when we were in the room, the rehearsal room, working on this play, it was extraordinary to have him share the story with us. But in looking at, in preparing, what's the quickest way to summarize the Medea myth, I found this wonderful clip on YouTube. It's two minutes, and I thought it would be just a great way to launch us into the discussion of Louise's adaptation of the Medea myth. So please cue the YouTube quote. This is the beginning of an ugly one-sided relationship between the two of them that ultimately causes quite a bit of pain to a lot more people than just them. But anyways, the plan works, and Jason retrieves the golden fleece after completing a few difficult tasks. Jason still has to flee with Medea because the king had changed his mind about giving away the fleece. Therefore, Medea deems it necessary to cut up her little brother and toss him into the ocean for her dad to retrieve and bury. I know, Medea is really insane, but Jason is also to blame. Eventually, they return to Yolkes, police's kingdom, and they are kicked out. So after many years of living together, Jason decides that he needs to get a new wife to replace the crazy old Medea. His fiance's name is Carissa. When Medea finds out she gets really mad and does a number of crazy tasks, including season, Jason's two sons and marrying them in front of her size. Keep in mind that there were also Medea's children. Jason chose the ultimate act of compassion and love when he tries to save his kids. So overall, this gruesome myth combined with the opinions of several philosophers and poets creates a very negative connotation towards love, and the people of ancient Rome tried to stay away from it. There you go. Two minutes. I love that. That is a really wonderful summary for stepping in to see Luis Alfaro's adaptation of Mojada. I think it hits all the main notes that structure the play. And looking in his research for Mojada, Mexican Medea in Los Angeles, Luis Alfaro discovered that 60% of women who cross experienced sexual violence and Amnesty International finds that it's equal numbers of children who cross to connect with their parents or other relatives experience sex trafficking and other forms of violence and abuse. A great book is Sonia Nazario's book Enrique's Journey about the children who get on the trains and come down to try to be reunite with their parents. But Luis, when he was in Chicago, began talking with women who had crossed to learn about their stories and was very struck with the testimony that was being shared with him. One of those stories forms a core moment in the play, but all of those stories are composites that he drew on. In Luis's words from an interview that we conducted with him, that number of 60% of women who cross finding that they are experiencing sexual violence, he says that's an extraordinary cost to pay when what you want is a better life for your children. These are important numbers and statistics for us to take into the moment of seeing the play. The title of the play, I want to talk about that a little bit because when you talk to Spanish speakers, that's a very loaded term to hear that term because literally in Spanish it means wet back. I want to talk about why Luis Alfaro felt that was a very important word to have in the title of this play. One is it's a historical term. It's a slur, but it's historically embedded in U.S. history. Looking at World War II, the U.S. actually opened its doors to migrants from Mexico coming up to lend work to help as farm laborers so that we would have food on our tables. That was called the Bracero program. Bracero means workers' arms, you know, that you have your arms in movement. But then in the wake of that, as the climate began to politically shift and our economics began to shift, there was Operation Wet Back, which was rounding up of Mexicans. Anybody who looked Mexican, so a lot of people who visually, the police, the immigrants, vigilantes, whoever was working in concert, they thought you looked Mexican, you got rounded up. So this was part of Operation Wet Back. There's a lot of history and politics around that that I encourage you to learn about. The title, therefore, is this very important term to have us think about the past and how it resonates to us in the present. And for the character, Madea, for her to think about her relationship to the word mojada, Wet Back, it's really to also remind us this is somebody who's caught in a cultural undertow and complete dissonance between how she sees herself and what has motivated her to come to the U.S. and how others see her. Including her own family, people in her own community. So it's a very rich and complicated play. This is not just a story about how an Americanized mainstream community looks at immigrants in the Latino community. Within the play, there's three layers of immigration. There's multiple layers of immigration. There's what we call the 1.5 generation, which is the child Akan who comes over with his parents. He's becoming Americanized. Right before our very eyes in the course of the play, you watch his journey unfold. So that's one generation of immigrants. Then you have the generation of immigrants represented by Madea, who is a recent crosser, her and her husband, Jason Hasson, in a post NAFTA world. And what kind of opportunities they encounter as part of their immigration experience to achieve the American dream. Then you have an older character, Armida, who's been a country for, I would say, math-wise about two decades. And she represents somebody who came over under a complete different political climate. She actually talks about her story, and I'm not going to give that away. But her story is a very different story because it's before NAFTA. It's in a whole other moment. And then you have Josefina, the vendor who has a food cart. And you have her perspective. And they all come from roughly the same region in Mexico, but even coming from that same region, they all have very, very different vision of themselves, what they want in life, and how they belong to the community. So those are important things to, I think, think about in looking at the Madea and the thing going into the play. Before we jump into our conversation today, I want to talk about a few things about the aesthetics that you'll encounter. So I've shared with you, this is a play using mythology to look at trauma, immigration, the American dream. And it's very important that that story, I think, is told by Luis Alfaro because of his history. It's very important that it's told in this moment at OSF, but also in live theater where we are, in the tradition of Greek theater, being presented with a story that's inviting us to think about how it impacts the way we think about civic engagement and about our cultural moment and who we do and don't want to be as a society. And how we define who is and isn't part of our citizenship. So we have the red signs again thing, we welcome everyone. What does that mean? Think about Greek theater. Who did Greek theater welcome originally? Who was included? Who was excluded in Greek theater? Women, slaves? Eventually how have we evolved our thinking about Greek theater? What about Greek theater has been the source of international adaptations? In doing dramaturgical work for the play, I was very struck about how much of Greek theater is done in other languages in the United States or in the UK and the invitation is for you to sit and experience the Greek or for you to sit and experience hearing it in Japanese with no translations. There's something visceral about our understanding through the aesthetics of the theater and through the actors' bodies and their voices and how the set is designed. That's very invitational to us because we enter those spaces knowing the myth but we also enter the spaces with something I think very primal in our storytelling DNA about what these stories about family, community and citizenship, how they resonate for us. The set, Juliette Kurio, something important to share with you about her as a director is she's the daughter of a visual artist and so for her as a director she's very much working in the tradition of Lorca, somebody who said theater plays are poems with legs in the tradition of someone like Maria Irene Fornez who says plays are paintings with words. So when you come in to see the work or if you've seen the play, the aesthetics of it are completely rich and bring us into this world and looking at objects. There was a wonderful op-ed piece today in the New York Times about an exhibition at the Parsons School of Design where it begins with a visual montage that's been created of all kinds of artifacts that have been gathered from immigrants who have crossed at the border and taking all those artifacts and putting them on display but also turning them into the stuff of a visual montage and you walk across the floor where this montage is projected so that you're literally in the footsteps through the objects of the journeys that the crossers have taken. You'll see the resonances of that kind of thinking on the stage with the choice of the objects looking at how with Greek theater the notion of a theater in the round think about there's certain objects that are creating a sacred circle for storytelling that people step into on the stage and how that is part of aesthetically resonating with Greek theater, not just thematics. And then note the wonderful, wonderful set designed by Christopher Sable of the house itself on stage at a cast and thinking about how so much of Greek theater has the trolley or something that comes from above to really have an invitation to thinking about the sacred. When we came in here today we heard, you can see some of the, this isn't the, I don't think we're on set here, this is a representation of the set design but it gives you a sense of the costumes, you'll see the fencing and the whole notion of being outside as very important elements in the play and then when you came into the theater today we heard the soundscape by David Molina, incredibly rich music but think about how he's using sound to cure us to think about the crossing journey but also to think about history and culture and family and then Lonnie Alcaraz, the lighting designer and there is incredible use of shadows, think about when people cross and the way that light becomes a really important part of the journey and how that will carry forward but also people living in communities where we are besieged by light pollution, like where you live thinking about the economics of that, about the helicopters that come in and out about that contrasted with nature. So those are just some things I want to share about the aesthetics of the work and you'll see an incredible, incredible cast as the storytellers. They will stop here because there's so much more to share but I'm interested in our conversation. For those of you who have seen the work or questions that you have to prepare your experience about it but so excited to have all of you here today to talk together about this play and why you came, why is it an important story for you to talk about if you've already seen it but to develop interest in it and prepare for seeing it. So perhaps we can open up, Russell? Yeah, if anybody has questions, we do have a couple of mics going around so please wait for a mic. Thank you. I've seen the play and it takes a few days to digest the ending. The question I have is the 1.5 generation, the young man because it's so highlighted in the notes, did his role expand from the Chicago version and now that you've learned about the effect of the 1.5, does Louis Afaro continue to adjust his dialogue and I'll just close by briefly saying that I saw a glimpse of the contrast as an immigrant, the child is accepted in school but the parents are not so currently in the country there's a difference in the illegality which may have played into the ending. So what we see further development as it goes along. Thank you. That's a great question. I didn't get to see the Chicago production sadly but I did see the early incarnation of this work, when it was titled Bruja, which means witch and when it was stage of the magic theater in San Francisco and there were two children in that production so it's evolved quite a bit. I don't know if Luis has plans to further revise it but I do think in this particular production, actors are always a huge source of inspiration. Sabina has been, plays Mohada, she's been in the production since the very beginning. Sabina Zunica Varela and she is incredible at Mohada. This is a role that she's had a huge influence in helping Luis develop. Last year when we talked about Ro here at OSF, there were several actors who have brought in, who work with the playwright to help develop a role. The cast in this way is doing this with Luis helping to evolve it but Sabina has played a really important role in Mohada. I would imagine JJ because of the story that I shared with you earlier about the conversation he had with us as we were building the play. Of course that has a huge impact and I think as national politics we've seen the labels put on children. In the New York Times piece today they talked about how this notion of a wall and over decades the way that certain fencing and walls have built. In a lot of ways this is a very passive aggressive form of violence in that rather than doing direct harm to the crossers they're forcing them to go into nature where nature does the harm. I think when we're talking about children we do see this triangulation where children get put in the crossfires about what we are and aren't willing to advance in our thinking and how we reach out and expand our definitions of citizenship and community. I think the questions you're asking about the role of the child actor in this play are crucial. I think lastly I don't want to give plot spoiler at all about anything that's too much about Luis's adaptation because he does use the adaptations as templates. But in looking at the end of the Medea story I think Luis is very much calling on us to think about going back to this issue that when we look at people's stories about violence and trauma what is the language that they're telling us through violence and through sharing or passing forward traumatic experience. What can't be articulated that that becomes the only language by which they feel they can express what it is that they're carrying. So the Greek mythologies become very potent ways in which to look at how does language, how does trauma become a violence and certainly with the Medea story thinking about the role of one's progeny and how they're a really important part of the exploration of Greek myth. Those are really crucial questions but it did evolve quite a bit the journey with what he's doing with the child, the role of the child protagonist in the play. Thank you. So one of the things that's essential to the Medea story of course is that she's not only an immigrant, she's a woman and I think last year you touched on this talking about Hamlet as well but we have this issue of not just the violence and trauma that's derived from her experience as an immigrant but in the original Medea it's also derived from the gender power and equity as a source. In the Latino culture there's also an element of that that at least is perceived from Machismo and I'm wondering how that aspect of the trauma that's derived from the violence with that as its source is incorporated into the story. Thank you so much. I deeply appreciate that question. Often when we think about Latino culture Machismo gets used to say oh that brand of patriarchy that's something specific. I think in Luisa's work you have patriarchal responses and patriarchal behavior but I think it's really about inequities in power through how do men respond to their circumstances? How do they pass forward wounds in very gendered ways that come out as very patriarchal and what we might call Machismo? In Latino culture there's also positive aspects of Machismo women having strong values of being hardworking, honoring their family and community so it's not just a negative thing that's where I really want us to talk about patriarchy. In Mojave something to share to think about with the gender disparity is what happens when women are only culturally valued in their roles as somebody's wife, somebody's mother somebody's girlfriend, somebody's grandmother and what happens when you don't fit into any of those roles and what happens when you're in a survival economy where that has been the matrix of the rules within the family what happens in a survival economy where women have to work and then what happens when your whole world begins to change and you're no longer grounded to that role of being somebody's wife somebody's mother, somebody's girlfriend or in the play a saint. That's another line from the play brought in. It looks at what happens to the family dynamics but what happens to Medea within that context. Jason, the husband, he is allowed to go out into the public sphere. As a man he can go and find work. It's difficult but he can enter the public sphere in a certain way that makes it very difficult for this woman who is limited in her English. Oops, sorry, limited in her skills, limited in her English, limited in her skills, limited within her family dynamics. What happens to her? That's a crucial question to think about the gender dynamics in the play and I would invite us not to be mindful of things that come up for us that our thinking has been shaped by the discourse of the media in the public sphere and to be mindful of how we've been taught to think about the term machismo how we've been taught to think about the term barrio how we've been taught to think about the border. All of those things I think the play gives us an important invitation to rethink what it is that we think we know by looking at the humanity of these characters because all of them have heroic elements and all of them have flawed elements and I think that's what makes theater so rich and fascinating and wonderful is we'll leave the space with our thinking provoked. I'm wondering what were some of the hardest choices since you got to see probably a very different version of the play than what we actually got to see on stage. What do you think are some of the hardest choices that you and Luis had to make to get it to the point that we saw? That's a huge question I think. There's a couple that are really difficult. One is you'll see with the cast or as you've already experienced it's an extraordinary cast. Like extraordinary. The theater artists who have helped to build the play it's an extraordinary group of theater artists. They've all been working in Latino theater between 20 and 30 years and then we've been paired through OSF the team has these incredible young theater artists part of the theater making experience. You'll see on stage there's a digital backdrop that's part of the set. You'll also see there's a digital effect that's within the play extraordinary this intergenerational work taking place. But the cast on stage each and every moment all the characters on stage is an amazing moment of storytelling because you're looking at veteran or consummate actors. Laquine Valdez the son of Luis Valdez plays Jason. You're looking at somebody whose craft came out of being born into El Teatro Campesino. It's extraordinary to see that on stage. Vivi's extraordinary legendary actor of our theaters playing Tita the Greek chorus on stage and then JJ imagine this young actor this is his launch point into his career as a storyteller whether he chooses to be an actor or whether his career will go in another direction. So the most difficult work of course is when as you discover the play and rehearse it you know you need to cut scenes. Taking any scenes away from the actors is at any point it's very very difficult. I think the other decision was you're working with the play it's in progress you're working with it all the way to the ultimate moment. There will be things over the life of this run here at OSF the many many beautiful months I'm certain there will be things that get adjusted and changed. I'm excited to drop in during the run and see it. I saw opening weekend and I'm seeing it today because I'm curious about what will have happened just over the course of the week. But another big challenge was you know all the way up to opening making certain decisions about moving things around. I think it makes the work it made the work stronger I think the decisions make the work stronger but imagine the incredible love, care and trust you need from your cast that they have to have a generosity of spirit thinking about the larger context of the storytelling but also about the playwright to be able to be okay we've learned our lines really as an actor your lines, your storytelling it becomes like a tattoo on your body taking anything away as like trying to erase part of the tattoo and then of course all kinds of dominoes fall as you change something because it could impact the lighting it could impact any number of things so the most challenging part was remaining true to the story that needs to be told and making some difficult decisions but it's been such an extraordinary experience to have a great cast OSF has wonderful theater company and the range of theater artists involved in making the production so I would say that's the most challenging part and the least I follow he's an extraordinary visionary of the American theater and to have the opportunity to watch someone like that expand the work and build it and revise it on the ground it's really a beautiful beautiful thing to be a part of that just a quick note it is ten minutes to one if you need some extra time to go to the matinee please feel free to exit quietly thank you I want to change the question a little bit talk about Luisa Farrar as a community artist and his theater grows out of his embeddedness and connection to the community but I assume it's not just of one way from community to art but then goes on to sort of change the community and community responses to that is there anything particularly that you or Luis would hope would happen in this community in response to well I could share with you something that was shared with me about another drama turd when she saw the play opening night an audience member leaned over to her and said is this real did these stories really happen and she said well here's the statistics and shared some of the statistics I've shared with you and the audience member said I had no idea so I think that that's what you hope with the work is that people leave with inquiry inquisitiveness but they also leave seeing the world anew and again when we're looking at these stories of violence and trauma imagine for all of these women Luis interviewed many of them in Chicago but they're all in our communities including here in Ashland, Oregon how many women immigrants are here sitting with their stories thinking no one understands that as part of the cost they bored a better life for their children in the next generation that they endured and hazarded sexual violence and imagine there's the story of what they go through in the crossing but imagine those who are on the other end and understand that is going to be a risk of the journey they know on the other end what the hazards can be and that you embrace that risk because the other risk is much more dire to leave your children at home to die of poverty or to die of all the complications around poverty including political violence so I think that's what Alfaro hopes you know even in the top of our conversation today sharing about what inspired him to write at Epistle Ray what inspired him to write Electricidad you're hearing those stories removed and just the response we had in the room of people saying oh my goodness listen to that testimony that's being shared that inspired that art making and I think so there's two things Alfaro wants it's an invitation for us to engage with the work and everything it brings up but I also think artistically it's a very powerful invitation as well I find in theater I spoke about this last year with the Hamlet Lecture but I dedicate my work to talking about in a scholarly realm but as an artist helping storytellers tell stories about violence and trauma that's what I focus on and that comes from a very personal place I've survived violence and trauma I left home at 15 and art really saved my life it was the circumstance of growing up in the state of California trying to prop 13 and having access to public arts being able to have books you know growing up in a home where there wasn't books there wasn't people educated we did not go to museums maybe there was the TV but how other stories and discovering the artistic magic of making things watching people tell stories reading stories activating my own imagination how that helped me realize wow maybe I could tell a story one day I love these stories but maybe I can tell a different story than the story I've been born into so I think one of the most powerful parts of this experience is the support that we can be inspired to give to the arts and to think about how the cultural specificity of storytelling that's just as important and vibrant and as critical as experiencing other forms of storytelling and this is why I think it's fantastic the season that we have Mojada, Medea and Los Angeles alongside Julius Caesar and Henry Part One and Shakespeare and Love for me that whole you know a week of seeing all of those plays the incredible invitations and provocations from all of those plays to think about our contemporary political moment but also the incredible artistic inspiration that you leave just with the marvelous journey of the storytelling I thank you for that question we have we just have time for one more quick question hi I just would also like to add to this moment that you describe the very locality of this moment we live in a region of wine country there's a workshop tomorrow at Medford Library of how to establish a sanctuary home we have people who are already being rounded up and I just think and hope that the impact of this play will add to the efforts that have already started in our community and it's kind of over there or complaining about Washington or whatever but it's right here thank you so when you see the play and it sounds like I hear you saying this the characters in the play and the lives we see in the journey of the play they will remind us of the faces of the people who are in our community who are helping put food on the table helping to fuel our industries but also invisible right as the garment workers as housekeepers as food worker food service workers there's a whole range of economy of people we don't see and this is a way to make who they are their humanity and what they've endured and things that they're thinking about that we might normally not see and then there's the anchor of it in contrast to this moment and raising awareness for us about the very issues that you just shared so thank you, thank you so much thank you thank you so much for such an incredible afternoon thank you to HowlRound and OSL thank you