Funny ‘Manifest Destinitis’ Needs a Dash Less Moliere

Audience and authorial tastes are changing all the time, and that’s why a Moliere adaptation (amid its originator’s bawdy humor) might not catch up in one fell swoop. Nonetheless, San Diego Repertory Theatre’s ‘Manifest Destinitis’ is a lot of fun as it looks at a core premise of 19th-century American expansionism.

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A Classical Tragedy Reinvented: Oedipus in the L.A. Barrio

Playwright Luis Alfaro has bravely taken the story of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’ and reimagined it in contemporary Southern California’s Chicano culture. His Oedipus is born not in Thebes but in Los Angeles, and instead of coming of age in the royal household of Corinth, he learns his trade in Kern County’s California State Prison . . .

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