Octavio Solis Hits the National Stage
by Nirmala Nataraj

The works of playwright Octavio Solis are indicative of a master at the top of his game. On the one hand, these are plays that draw on personal stories, particularly about the Chicano experience in America, but the award-winning Solis doesn't allow easy rules or formulas to dictate his work. His characters are fleshy and full-blooded, completely engaged with the world around them, which is tinged by a sense of the epic. Identifying a Solis play is less about language than it is about the sentiments evoked by seeing it on stage. ("Octavio is not a signature playwright, in that he never writes about the same thing time and again—you can't always identify a Solis play right off the bat, but there is usually an intensity that accompanies it," says California Shakespeare Theater's artistic director, Jonathan Moscone.) His plays are simultaneously dark, funny, transcendent, brutally honest, painfully tender and swathed in the sort of magic and wordplay that routinely make for stunning performances.

Solis has penned over 20 plays, including Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, June in a Box, Lydia and two upcoming adaptations, Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote (for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer) and John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven (for Cal Shakes' main stage in 2010). His works have been performed across the nation, from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to the Yale Repertory Theatre to Bay Area–based companies like Campo Santo and the Magic Theatre. The recipient of an NEA Playwriting Fellowship, the Will Glickman Award and the National Latino Playwriting Award, Solis is a working artist who's accustomed to juggling multiple projects, one who is unfazed by stardom and driven by his craft rather than the accolades that have accumulated over the years. "I never feel, after writing a play, that I've said everything I've needed to. I'm not content resting on my laurels."

The description "Bay Area playwright" is one that seeps almost unconsciously into conversations about Solis, but given the variety of locations that inform his work, it's difficult to pigeonhole him so easily. All the same, the experience of living in the Bay Area is one that has affected Solis's oeuvre over the past 20 years. "You can't really categorize Bay Area playwrights," he says, "but there is a sense that, from people like Philip Kan Gotanda to Peter Sinn Nachtrieb to Amy Freed, they are all responding to issues that are happening around the city. There is a different consciousness in the writing."

The same can be said for the general San Francisco theatre scene, which Solis is firmly entrenched in, particularly through his work with Intersection for the Arts' resident theatre company, Campo Santo. "Compared to other places in the country, there's just more theatre here," he says. "You have a lot of little companies on a grassroots level, people who are deadly serious about doing new theatre by local writers. San Francisco is a gateway…the companies here are very specific about cultural diversity, which feels like a trend that will affect the rest of the nation in the future."

Solis grew up in El Paso, Texas--a location that still infuses many of his works, including the upcoming Lydia, which will be performed at the Marin Theatre Company in March--but moved to San Francisco in 1989 and put down permanent roots here. "It's home now," he notes. "I love my neighborhood, I love my house, right by 20th Avenue, which has some of the finest restaurants in the city and a very diverse population."

Solis's foray into theatre was through acting in the late 1980s. He began writing his first plays to showcase his acting talent, particularly in Dallas, where he lived and worked, teaching at a magnet arts high school and bartending in the evenings. "You're a playwright because you want to work in the theatre, not because you want to be a writer," he insists. "I loved working with actors, and I loved the theatre in a way that separates playwrights from fiction writers or writers whose work exists in print." He recalls that people who saw his work performed were invariably more interested in his writing than in his acting. "I tried to have it both ways at first," he laughingly recalls, "as both a writer and an artist, so at first, the material I wrote was something of a vanity project. But after a while, I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, so the acting had to become subordinate to that."

At the time, Solis had already been writing poetry and short fiction, but he also became progressively more interested in playwriting after teaching four writing classes for the stage. "Before doing the writing [seriously], I never really thought of it as a passion," he says. "It was always there, but the realization of the passion came later for me."

It was Solis's play Man of the Flesh, produced in 1988 by Teatro Dallas, that placed him on the map. It is what Solis refers to as his Day of the Dead play, a darkly humorous piece that draws upon the Don Juan legend in its depiction of the main character, a breezy Lothario confronted by the women he has impregnated. "It was fun to play with this politically incorrect character," he says, "and the play was filled with all these interesting scientific ideas I was reading about at the time regarding new concepts and approaches to biology. It worked, it made sense, but it still felt like it was too rigid because I had been given these predetermined limits on what to write."

Since then, Solis's approach to writing has changed considerably. While he initially began with an idea, Solis now finds his way into his work via images. He sees what he calls a central image in his mind's eye and simply goes with it. "It's like following a ghost into its own house, figuring out what it's trying to tell you," he explains. "I've learned there's always a more important dialogue going on in a work besides the one between the characters; there's the dialogue between the playwright and the play, which is infinitely more interesting." The process is nonlinear, and Solis only discovers by the end of the play where the central image will be located. "With Lydia, I saw the very final image of the play, a brother and sister, and I asked myself, 'Where is this happening? Who are they?'"

Solis's itinerant approach is one that marks his collaborations, which are permeated with playfulness and a spirit of discovery. To this day, Solis, who has also directed and collaborated with a multitude of people and organizations, part of the creative process that takes place during a production. "As a playwright, you're only in solitary confinement some of the time. I haven't done my job until I bleed on stage with them."

Solis's long-standing relationship with Campo Santo in many ways embodies the crucial nature of collaborative artistic relationships in his career. In May 1994, Intersection for the Arts, which didn't have a resident theatre company at the time, produced Solis's El Paso Blue. Two of the four founding members of Campo Santo, Luis Saguar and Michael Torres, had been involved in that production, and later went on to stage Campo Santo's first Solis play, Santos & Santos, a multigenerational tragedy about the lives of Chicano lawyers, in 1996. (The play was originally produced by Eureka Theatre and Thick Description in 1992.)

Campo Santo's artistic director, Sean San Jose, recalls that when he saw Santos & Santos, he was startled at "how deep the themes are, and how it can go from very personal matters of the heart to something much larger and historical. [The play] was a shining example for us of how the power of words can lead a production." Campo Santo went on to stage three of Solis's other works: Bethlehem in 2003, The Ballad of Pancho & Lucy (a Latino "Bonnie and Clyde" piece) in 2006, and June in a Box (a musical odyssey based on one of the first kidnappings to stick in the nation's pop-culture consciousness, also directed by Solis) in 2008.

San Jose, like so many others, is intrigued by the undefinable nature and originality of Solis's work. "Although Octavio has never given up this idea of writing about the borders of the heart, memory, geography and nationhood, he's capable of telling that story anew each time. You're not following the same family throughout Octavio's plays, the way you might in a Sam Shepard landscape. He has a way of taking in new ways of writing and using them to expand his work a hundredfold."

Solis asserts that his collaboration with Campo Santo is based on a deep respect for the company's craft and innovation. "They are so eager to step into the lion's den. They don't like safe or dishonest theatre, and that makes them well suited to my work…which often raises the stakes as high as they can go, where it becomes a life or death matter."

For Campo Santo, the feeling is mutual. "Octavio is the ultimate collaborator and such a lover of community," says San Jose. "Knowing he's always going to be along for the ride is comforting, especially as he gets more national recognition…he's interested in doing the work, connecting with other artists, first and foremost, as opposed to simply seeing his plays produced."

In the last 20 years, much of Solis's work has centered on the Mexican American experience, but he is beginning to see a change within his own subject matter. The pieces are more personal and are moving increasingly toward a realism that may not have existed in earlier plays, which toyed with boundaries of time, identity and logic. "Lydia is a part of [my new way of writing], but it's so lyrical that it doesn't get stuck in the kitchen sink realm," he says. "It's the personal stories that interest me…but I strive to challenge myself and stretch myself, and often the work demands it. You have to listen to the play, and if you resist it, you mess it up."

While Solis doesn't consider himself a playwright of "ideas" ("Ideas are what happen to an audience when a play is over"), his imagistic raison d'etre doesn't apply to all of his work, either. Take Solis's two new plays, Don Quixote and The Pastures of Heaven. For the first play--an adaptation of part one of Cervantes's epic picaresque novel that will be staged Elizabethan style, with 24 actors over three hours--Solis was challenged to bring the most important book in Spanish literature to life, in all its bombast and bulk.

"Don Quixote is a Spanish novel, and ultimately a European novel, not a Latino or New World story, but it still resonates," Solis asserts. "Spanish is my original language, and that's where this novel, the first novel ever written, comes from, so it's exciting to adapt."

Director Laird Williamson welcomed Solis's trademark collaborative style, as well as his sense of fun and jubilant writing approach. "This play is so much about the pursuit of idealism…the touch of madness required to live an unfettered life. Octavio has a massive imagination and a fondness for the piece that worked well with the adaptation," he says. "One can get lost in overseriousness [when adapting a novel of this caliber], but he always has fun with it…moreover, he's not slavishly faithful, so the production will have a freedom all its own."

On the other hand, there's The Pastures of Heaven, based on a series of interconnecting stories by John Steinbeck, set in California's Salinas Valley. Solis says, "This is a piece about the larger community that doesn't necessarily concern itself with the Latino experience," which has been at the heart of many of Solis's plays. All the same, the opportunity to depict Salinas--an agricultural area of Northern California that is often relegated to obscurity--became a fascinating opportunity for Solis to expand his œuvre.

Solis began working with Cal Shakes and Word for Word in October 2007, as part of a New Works/New Communities venture. Along with Solis, the two companies worked on the adaptation of The Pastures of Heaven through a rigorous combination of field research and workshopping, and are still in the process of fine-tuning a draft. Cal Shakes artistic director Jonathan Moscone, along with Word for Word co-artistic directors Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, knew that Solis was the right man to do a piece for them, even before they'd decided on Steinbeck's comparatively obscure book. "Octavio is a deeply original playwright, even in his adaptations [such as Dreamlandia, adapted from Pedro Calderon de la Barca's play Life Is a Dream]," says Moscone. "He finds his own poetry to contemporize and localize existing worlds. Moreover, he is such a great soul; he thinks of people in such interesting and compassionate ways that we all just wanted to be in a room with him, especially considering the collaboration would be three years of work, not just three weeks of rehearsal."

Although Steinbeck and Solis have two wildly different approaches to their craft, Moscone says that Steinbeck's work is very Chekhovian in its unromantic observance of the human condition and quiet sense of drama, which is also characteristic of Solis's work. But again, Solis never forgoes his own voice in his approach to adapting. "Octavio reveals an openness and interest in the subject that allows him to start to hear how Steinbeck writes. He writes from that world, then starts to jam with it, like a jazz artist riffing on something else. He creates a sound that connects to the original sound, but it's his own, and that's what you want in an adaptation."

Perhaps one of the most exciting things on Solis's plate these days is his play, Lydia, which premiered at the Denver Center in early 2008 under the directorship of Juliette Carrillo, who directed an incarnation of the show at Yale Repertory Theatre in February and, later this spring, will be reprising the show with the Center Theatre Group at Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum. The play, which nabbed a Henry Award for Outstanding New Play in 2008, is set in the 1970s along a sultry stretch of El Paso border. It tells the tale of a Mexican American family whose lives are dramatically altered when their daughter suffers brain damage after a car accident. An undocumented immigrant named Lydia is hired as the family's maid and forms a bond with the young girl, also becoming a catalyst for various tensions and the revelation of some devastating family secrets.

"Even though the time and place and culture are very specific, it's an 'everyfamily' story," explains Carrillo, who had the privilege of being the first to stage the play. "I connected with the tremendous emotional journey of the play…the otherworldliness and the sheer beauty of the people in it. It's got a lot of love behind the darkness, which makes it really powerful."

Carrillo, who met Solis through the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre, has directed a slew of Solis plays over the years, fostering a collaborative relationship that the playwright numbers among his most valued. Says Solis, "Her approach is organic, and she protects the mystery of the play while always insisting on clarity when it's needed. She's also the kind of director who brings together actors that understand they may not have to know why something is on the page, but they can find out together. I always hear actors asking, 'What's my motivation?' but with human behavior, people don't always have a motivation."

Bay Area audiences will get to see what critics have been talking about when the Marin Theatre Company stages Lydia this month. Artistic director Jasson Minadakis was one of the first people to see a draft of Lydia, and in fact met up with Solis when he was in the midst of writing the play. "I'm so grateful a theatre in the Bay Area has chosen to do this work," says Solis. "Jasson has brought so much fire and passion to the piece. He is changing the way things are done in Marin, which is exciting to see."

While 1970s El Paso is the prism through which the piece is filtered, the fact that the piece will be showcased for Solis's home audience is significant. "Because three out of four of the first productions are directed by the same person, it's important for there to be a Bay Area incarnation. Multiple artists get to bring their vision to it, and you see how the play affects different communities," says Minadakis.

In addition, despite the popular perception of Marin as an affluent white community, Minadakis is excited to break that homogeneity by representing the significant population of Mexican Americans in the county, many of whom live in the low-income Canal district of San Rafael. "He is transforming our idea of the experience of the 'hyphenated American,' so he's a unique and important American voice," says Minadakis. "He writes big stories and is creating a new American mythology that is much larger than contemporary moments."

Carrillo notes that the Mexican American experience is seldom expressed in the mainstream theatre world, but given demographic shifts, she believes that will change and that it will force larger swathes of the American populace to take note of Solis. "Lydia is a huge step towards that. [Octavio's] work hasn't been produced on a full-scale level on the East Coast until now (at Yale). I find that absurd. I think the East Coast is going to see a lot of him from now on."

Aside from shepherding his upcoming productions through the creative process, Solis is teaching at Stanford University and is also steadfastly at work on Ghost of the River, a cycle of shadow puppetry plays for ShadowLight Productions, not to mention new commissions for Yale Repertory, South Coast Repertory and the Denver Center. Despite Solis's prestige, evident in his projects and the number of artists so quick to attest to both his character and his genius, there is no indication that he has let the fame go to his head. Indeed, humility appears to be the linchpin of the playwright's personality.

"Conventional success isn't pertinent to me," he says. "It's not about the words, and it certainly isn't about the money. I've had plenty of good reviews for plays I felt I could have done better with, and vice versa. It's about the impact I make with my audience…. To receive an honest, personal reaction to my work…that is lasting, and that's how I measure success."

Solis is often pegged as a playwright whose influence will be felt strongly well into the future because of his subject matter's relevance to the cultural moment, in addition to his singular storytelling capacity--which has found admirers of all stripes, theatre lovers or not. But for those closest to the playwright, the question of his legacy isn't so cut-and-dried. "He's so prolific and imaginative that there's no way of being able to say what Octavio's legacy will be in 20 years," muses San Jose. "Whatever he's doing at that time, I know he'll be creating work that crosses borders--cultural, linguistic, emotional, aesthetic--and tells the most inventive tales of the heart. He'll be leading that brigade."

Lydia plays at Marin Theatre Company from March 19 to April 2. Tickets are $20–51. Call (415) 388-5208, or visit marintheatre.org.

Nirmala Nataraj is a San Francisco-based freelance writer, editor, playwright/poet and erstwhile filmmaker.