Latino playwrights revisit the classics

“Sophocles is reborn in a San Jose barrio in “Electricidad.”

Luis Alfaro reinvents the house of Atreus in “Las Casa De Atrides,” as a Latino family steeped in gang culture. Agamemnon becomes “El Auggie,” the king of the hood. Electra emerges as a hard-core Chola decked out in tattoos, tanks and flip-flops. Her mother Clemencia is Clytemnestra as a chain-smoking matriarch in high heels who orders hits as if they were pizzas. Desperate for power, she’ll do anything to be a queen. You know, “como la Oprah.”

The ancient speaks to the now in Alfaro’s gutsy new Spanglish reinvention of the Greek tragedy. The playwright filters Sophocles’ bloody cycle of violence and vengeance through the prism of pop culture in a heady mixture of classical and kitsch, Spanish and English. The made-over myth is now in its regional premiere at San Jose’s Teatro Visión.”

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