Humanities Events

Fall 2024 | The Sor Juana Project: A Reading of Love is the Greater Labyrinth

Love is the Greater Labyrinth is a madcap take on Greek mythology by famous Mexican author Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, now translated into English for the first time by UCLA's Diversifying the Classics.

This is the latest installment of the signature Humanities Event Series and is presented by the Humanities Program in partnership with the Department of Theater + Dance. It is co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Parents Fund, the Revelle College 60th Anniversary Committee, the UC San Diego Alumni Association, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Additional support was provided by UCLA's Diversifying the Classics.

Any views or opinions expressed in this program are solely those of the speaker(s) and/or organizer(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Office of the Vice Chancellor.

In Love is the Greater Labyrinth — newly translated UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics — Sor Juana reimagines and transforms the classical myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In Sor Juana’s version, Theseus (Teseo) braves the labyrinth and defeats the monster, but then confronts a greater challenge: an emotional labyrinth created by beautiful princesses, rival lovers, tyrannical kings, and scheming servants.

At the heart of the play, Theseus is torn between his duty to Ariadna, who helped him survive the Minotaur, and his love for her sister, Fedra. Around this central issue, Sor Juana constructs a story designed to delight the audience full of music, masked balls, mistaken identities, midnight trysts, and duels to the death. By reimagining the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as a multi-sided love story for a seventeenth-century audience in New Spain, Sor Juana has created a new type of myth, one that speaks as clearly and powerfully to our contemporary moment as it did to the court of a Viceroy in colonial Mexico City.