Luis Alfaro’s Mojada arrived at the Public Theater in 2019 with a new address for its immigrant family: Queens. Directed by Chay Yew and starring Sabina Zúñiga Varela as Medea, this adaptation relocated a story previously staged as Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles. The distinction matters to the play’s cultural argument. A familiar tragic name cannot stand in for the place a family inhabits. Alfaro’s revisions ask an inherited story to encounter another neighborhood.
The Los Angeles setting has its own documented history. Getty’s record of the 2015 production places the action in East Los Angeles and identifies Medea as a seamstress. Concord Theatricals lists a contemporary Boyle Heights yard for the play it licenses. Its catalogue also records the 2019 Public engagement. Those entries should be read separately: the publisher’s setting description does not establish the setting of that New York production. A retrospective has to distinguish the version described by a catalogue from the version that reached a particular stage.
In Lynne Heffley’s December 2019 USC interview, Zúñiga Varela describes returning to Alfaro’s work across successive adaptations. The article identifies the Public version as a story about a Mexican immigrant in Queens and traces the performer’s involvement in the 2015 Los Angeles production and its 2017 Oregon Shakespeare Festival staging. Her account treats revision as part of the acting process. Returning to Medea required approaching the changed script afresh rather than reproducing an earlier interpretation.
The changes reached the everyday world around the family. In his July 2019 TDF interview with Alfaro and Zúñiga Varela, Jose Solis identifies the new setting as Corona, Queens. He reports that a vendor associated with pan dulce in Los Angeles became a churro seller in New York, with subway sounds in the production’s environment. Such details suggest how adaptation can make a neighborhood legible through work, food and sound. They give the myth a local vocabulary without asking a single family to represent every immigrant experience.
The underlying problem remains urgent within the story: crossing into the United States does not secure the future the family imagines. Concord’s synopsis describes Jason’s optimism and Medea’s apprehension about their undocumented circumstances; TDF’s account of the Public version emphasizes the exploitation that follows the family’s arrival. Read together, these accounts support an interpretation of migration as an ongoing condition of the drama. Arrival begins another struggle over what safety and opportunity can mean.
Calling Mojada a modern Medea establishes its lineage; attending to its revisions reveals the labor of making that lineage speak locally. The move to Queens belongs to that process. This archival reading draws on production records and published interviews, rather than firsthand attendance. Those records show a playwright and performer revisiting a story as its surroundings change. They invite us to read each version on its own terms, with its particular address kept in view.
Correction (October 4, 2026): An earlier version of this article incorrectly treated the 2019 Public Theater production of Mojada as retaining the play’s Boyle Heights setting. Alfaro relocated that adaptation to Queens. The headline and analysis have been revised to distinguish the Los Angeles version from the 2019 New York adaptation.