Oedipus el Rey puts Sophocles’ great tragedy in a California prison yard. It’s playwright Luis Alfaro’s Latino gangland adaptation of Oedipus Rex, and it’s getting its area premiere from the Dallas Theater Center. In his review, KERA’s Jerome Weeks says this Oedipus is fierce and tender, new and old.

• Front Row review

• Dallas Morning News review

• TheaterJones review

•  KERA radio review:

Think of OZ, the landmark HBO prison drama from a dozen years ago: Six Latino inmates stand around in t-shirts, pumping iron, singing songs, swapping insults, desperate to kill the boredom. A story, an inmate yells, someone tell a story – “something about us,’ another says. ‘How we got here,’ one replies.

Then the back-and-forth turns to the new kid and what’s his story. “He’s got a story.” “Is it about what happened to him?” “Or what he made happen?” “I always get confused.” “Don’t confuse it!”

“Just tell it!”

That’s how Luis Alfaro’s high-testosterone, high-tattoo-content adaptation of Oedipus begins — with a chorus chanting and shouting and musing. For modern versions of Greek tragedies, the chorus is one of the clunkier, more archaic things to handle. Contemporary audiences often find the chorus — this group of concerned citizens commenting on the story — slow death to any dramatic action.

So modern adapters often shrink the chorus, absorb it or sideline it completely. But Alfaro actually has a chorus of prison convicts pretty much take over Oedipus el Rey. Only six men and one woman play all the roles here, keeping this 90-minute play tight and muscular. We’re thrust into a dark, brutal world of kingpins, violence, old folk traditions and family obligations – a world, in fact, much like ancient Athens.

A sign of how potent this production is: Moriarty likes using plays as sociopolitical platforms. His King Lear, for instance, was a tragedy about Alzheimer’s. His recent Christmas Carol concluded by indicting child labor. The problem isn’t with Moriarty’s well-meaning views; it’s that he’s stunted complex, troubling dramas. He’s made them into message delivery systems.

Playwright Alfaro also clearly wants to use Oedipus this way. He offers a lesson about our criminal justice system condemning young Latinos to gang life by taking away their fathers, their youth. And the Theater Center has certainly amplified that into a teachable moment: The lobby displays prison statistics.

But Alfaro’s drama actually succeeds where most such high-minded adaptations don’t. Any informative links between Athens and South Central LA simply fall away under the emotional power of his re-telling. Or better yet, they’re amplified, underscored. We’re hammered with how visceral and immediate Sophocles’ great tragedy remains – on the level of family and blood, sex and guilt.

Not everything Alfaro does works for the best. Characters occasionally refer to themselves as people in a story (riffing off those opening lines of convicts swapping tales). But the conceit only makes the play feel self-conscious, taking audience members out of a chillingly direct experience.

For all this to work, Alfaro has had to seriously streamline Oedipus. He’s removed the city-wide plague, for instance, that in Sophocles’ version is the trigger that forces Oedipus to uncover his own background.

But Alfaro does the condensing in a way that doesn’t strip out context and background. He flips the narrative: We don’t start with the present and work backward through revelations, like a detective story, the way Sophocles does  — because, let’s face it, we already know the revelations. Instead, we work on the back story, with Alfaro addressing various scenes and issues in ways Sophocles never does: How did Oedipus and Jocasta meet and fall in love? How could Laius and Oedipus ever meet and fight — when they already knew, one day, Laius would die at the hands of his son?

The answers often have to do with the disruptions caused by our prison system — as heavy as fate. There’s also the fierce antagonisms and family loyalties enforced by Mexican gangs and cartels — as iron-bound as destiny.

And then there’s just old-fashioned machismo. In this world, ethnic identity and masculinity are threatened and embattled, but they only roar and curse the louder. The young Oedipus is released from juvenile detention and heads for LA, even though the blind man he thinks is his father, Tiresias, told him not to. On the way, Oedipus gets into a little road-rage exchange with a stranger. Oedipus insults the stranger by calling him ‘old man.’ The stranger yells the road is MINE, calls Oedipus a little boy fresh out of lock-up. We know how all this ends, but, as staged here with these actors, the blustering machismo is still gripping.

The old man, of course, is Laius, a king of the streets in LA, the father Oedipus never knew. He’s played like an angry rock by David Lugo, a local actor who’s been woefully underused by North Texas theaters.

Speaking of the acting, that brings up something else Moriarty often does. He likes environmental stagings, the immersive experience with lots of people running in and around the audience, making us, supposedly, part of the action. The weakness of these stagings is that they fragment the focus; it’s often hard for any one actor to grab our attention when our heads are swiveling.

But Oedipus el Rey is presented upstairs in the smaller Studio Theatre at the Wyly, and Moriarty encloses us in a tiny, bare-bones arena in the prison yard (designed by Matthew McKinney). The playing space is so tight, the front-row theatergoers are likely to get splashed with fake blood. (The arena, by the way, clearly echoes the Coliseum or classic Greek theater design.)

Because that playing space is so small, and because Alfaro’s scenes often have just two characters tearing into each other, there’s no loss of focus, no escape. These actors have to grab our attention. And they do. In addition to Lugo, there’s Phillipe Bowgen as Oedipus, an intense tangle of youthful yearnings and angers. In contrast, Hector Garza’s Tiresias is a bruised, impressive, aged presence — the sage who tries to impart something about family and self to Oedipus: “The only thing that needs healing is the soul.”

Most of all, there’s Sabina Zuniga Varela, as Jocasta. A battered wife, she had the infant Oedipus yanked from her by Laius. In this defiantly macho world, she’s become tougher than anyone. But when she and Oedipus meet and first test each other, they find how needy and wounded the other actually is. She questions his blunt assertions of not needing anyone or anything, not even God. You’ll find, she warns, that you’ll need his comfort some day.

The two finally open up to each other in the long, erotic nude scene at the heart of this play — a beautiful and daringly simple duet in Moriarty’s staging. But the two are opening up, of course, to the worst possible person. That’s how Alfaro makes us feel the crushing weight of the tragedy, condensing it in a single moment of bared flesh and tender desperation.

In all of this, Varela is so compelling, so strong, so vulnerable, she practically makes it The Tragedy of Jocasta. She certainly helps make it one of the boldest shows Moriarty has ever directed.