by Luis Alfaro
A Modern Tragedy Seeking Redemption—and a Community Finding Reflection
In The Labours, Luis Alfaro’s bold new reimagining of Euripides’ Herakles, the mythical Herakles becomes Era (Spanish for Was), a female soldier navigating the disorienting path from military service back to civilian life. Her labours are not the heroic feats of legend, but internal battles—grappling with guilt, loss, and the irreversible harm done to her own family. The military becomes the modern underworld, and the battlefield is now within. This new Labours explores the trauma of war, the price of violence, and the long, uncertain road to redemption.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright, poet, and performance artist born and raised in downtown Los Angeles. A major voice in contemporary American theatre, he is the recipient of a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—commonly known as the “genius grant”—as well as honors from United States Artists, the Ford Foundation(Art of Change), the Joyce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the PEN America / Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master Dramatist. In 2024 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was named the World Theatre Artist by Theatre Communications Group. He is the 2025–26 Atelier Samuel Beckett Fellow and will travel to France in 2026.
Alfaro served as Associate Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group (2021–2022; previously 1995–2005), where he produced more than 150 new play commissions, productions, workshops, and readings across the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre, and Kirk Douglas Theatre. He is the only playwright in the history of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to receive two Fund for New American Plays awards in the same year.
His plays—including Electricidad,
Alfaro was the inaugural Playwright-in-Residence at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2013–2019), a member of the Playwright’s Ensemble at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago (2013–2020), and an inaugural Imaginista Latinx Playwright at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. He also served for two decades on the artistic staff of the Ojai Playwrights Conference.
Currently an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, Alfaro directs the MFA in Dramatic Writing program. He has also taught at the California Institute of the Arts, the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and was a Regents Fellow at the University of California, Riverside.
Before his prominence in theatre, Alfaro spent two decades in Los Angeles’ poetry and performance art communities, presenting work at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. His book The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro received the Greek & British Hellenic Prize and is licensed by Dramatists Play Service. Upcoming publications include Fornes in Context from Cambridge University Press and The Theatre of Luis Alfaro from Routledge.
A local Emmy winner and Emmy nominee for the PBS-produced short film Chicanismo, Alfaro has also recorded the spoken-word album down-town (SST/New Alliance Records), which received Best Spoken-Word Release from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors. He studied with playwright María Irene Fornés and performance artist Scott Kelman and emerged from the influential Inner-City Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles.
