Octavio Solis is a playwright and director living in San Francisco. His works Lydia, Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, La Posada Mágica, El Otro, Dreamlandia, The 7 Visions of Encarnacion, Bethlehem, Gibraltar, and Don Quixote have been produced at Denver Center Theatre Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York Summer Play Festival, Dallas Theater Center, Magic Theatre, Intersection for the Arts, South Coast Repertory, San Diego Repertory Theatre, San Jose Repertory Theatre, ShadowLight, Venture Theatre, Latino Chicago Theater Company, La Compania de Albuquerque, Teatro Vista, El Teatro Campesino, Undermain Theatre, Thick Description, Su Teatro, Campo Santo, and The Imua! Theatre Company. His collaborative works include Burning Dreams, co-written with Julie Hebert and Gina Leishman; Shiner, written with Erik Ehn; and Great Highway, written with Wendy Weiner. Solis is the recipient of the NEA 1995-97 Playwriting Fellowship, the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award, the Will Glickman Playwright Award, a production grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 1998 TCG/NEA Theatre Artists in Residence Grant, the 1998 McKnight Fellowship grant from the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, the 2003 National Latino Playwriting Award, the 2000–2001 National Theatre Artists Residency Grant from TCG, and the Pew Charitable Trust grant for Gibraltar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Octavio is a member of the Dramatists Guild and New Dramatists. He is currently working on commissions for Yale Repertory Theatre, South Coast Repertory, the Denver Center, and California Shakespeare Theater.

Check out Octavio’s plays,
available from Samuel French

Lydia
Dreamlandia
Bethlehem

Photo: Anne Hamersky

Q & A with Octavio Solis

Q: In your play LYDIA, the mysterious title character is brought in by the family to help take care of Ceci, a beautiful and vibrant teenage girl severely disabled in a car accident on the eve of her quinceañera. The two young women form an immediate bond, and this connection quickly unravels the complex web of secrets that have burdened the family for years. This piece has found success all over the U.S.A., including productions at Yale Repertory Theater in Connecticut, Denver Theatre Center in Colorado, and The Mark Taper Forum in California. What do you think these different audiences have all connected to in this piece? What was your experience while writing the play?

A: I resisted writing the proverbial family play for so long because I suspected I would draw on my own family experience and, frankly, I don’t think my life is that interesting to audiences. But there were voices inside calling on me to write this play—images, too—all calling for some embodiment and resolution. The chief image that I worked from was the final tableau at the play’s close. I didn’t know what it meant or who these people were, but I knew this was where events would lead me. Essentially, I was my own detective, gathering the moments, clues, and crimes which comprise the play. It was a very satisfying place from which to write.

What do people connect to in LYDIA? I wish I could tell you. I only know what matters to me. This household so full of love for each other and yet so repressed by their own desires is doomed to succeed at this thing we call the American Dream. Which is what they really want in the end, and what tears them all apart. Being Latino in Texas in 1971 is more universal than I ever thought possible.

Q: Your play DREAMLANDIA is based in part on the Spanish Golden Age play LIFE IS A DREAM by Calderón de la Barca, but set on the US/Mexico border. What inspired you to engage with such an enduring classic? What challenges/surprises did you encounter as you worked on the piece?

A: I worked on an earlier project which attempted to reinterpret Calderón’s LIFE IS A DREAM and which resulted in a very unique and successful production, but I felt that it had moved far from Calderón’s story and themes. I wanted to really embrace his story and see how it would fit in a more modern context. To me, the U.S./Mexico border region is where the surreal becomes real, and I found many parallels between that classic work and my own orientation to the Frontera. In DREAMLANDIA, the border is violated not just between the U.S. and Mexico, but between Dream and Reality, and Fate and Free Will.

The orphic nature of the oracles in LIFE IS A DREAM translates readily into the loaded tribal mysticism of the curandera in my DREAMLANDIA. This was the big surprise of my adaptation. The absence of the mother figure in Calderón’s play is countered by Dolores in mine. She is manifest as a ghost, yet her grip on the reins of reality are tighter than the Father’s in the play. This corresponds well to the Fate vs. Free Will argument of the original, which is the argument all of Latin America is still having with itself.

The real challenge came in how to address the resolution of Calderón’s play, which has always been troublesome to me. It seems a pat ending, and yet fraught with some nettlesome loose ends. I wanted to “fix” this “flaw.” In the end, I had to embrace this structural anomaly in his work and so devised an analogous resolution that is still quite different from Calderón’s own ending.

Q: BETHLEHEM was the winner of the 2003 National Latino Playwriting Award, and deals with a reporter forced to face his own dark past as he interviews a notorious murderer. What led you to take on this subject matter?

A: I was drawn to the question of evil and how we try to legislate our lives around it. It started when I saw a news story about an old man who had slain a prostitute after being released from prison; he had been serving a long sentence for raping and brutally maiming a young girl in California, and every community he had been settled into had spurned him. Nobody wanted him in town. Some awareness of his propensity for evil had exiled him from the world forever. He finally settled in Florida and just months later, at his advanced age, committed this rape and murder. I subsequently read many books on how evil has been reconsidered in an age that is essentially secular, and I was struck by how our society essentially cleaves to a medieval notion of evil even today. So I thought I’d write a play about the Devil. BETHLEHEM is my response to evil in the world.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create plays?

A: I came to playwriting via acting. I was trained as an actor in Dallas, Texas, but when I was found that I wasn’t getting cast, I thought I’d write some plays to feature myself. I cast my friends and students and directed the works at a local Punk club where I bartended. When all the directors and casting people I invited showed more interest in my writing than in my acting, I took the hint. After that, the plays just came easy. They weren’t always good, those early fumbling efforts, but they felt like a vocation. I had always written poetry before but had never considered that I could use that craft in the theatre.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

A: Story. I am always drawn to story. And the stories that take place along the Mexican border are the ones I find fascinating, complicated, urgent and relevant to our national discussion of the American character. The theatres that commission me understand that about me, but I have been known to turn my lens in other directions too. My play GIBRALTAR which I penned for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes places in San Francisco, for instance.

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your plays in a new or unexpected way?

A: Yes. Recently, Thick Description, a local San Francisco theatre company remounted an old work of mine, EL OTRO, with a new cast and a new approach. Sans set. Utterly stripped-down. Just an empty space, light, language and actors. No furniture to hide behind or use as a crutch. It was Solis Unplugged. I felt very exposed. But the whole world of the play was there with such clarity and passion, and the quality of listening was heightened to such a degree that I could hear the audience finishing the play in their heads, moment by moment. It was very validating.