San Francisco playwright and director Octavio Solis is one of the hardest working men in show business. Recently his Pulitzer-nominated play, Lydia, showed at four theaters, including the Marin Theater Company; he just did an adaptation of Don Quixote at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival using puppets, and now Ghosts of the River, stories told with shadow puppets, opens at the Brava Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday after a successful run at San Jose’s Teatro Visión earlier this month.
Solis grew up in El Paso, about a mile from the Rio Grande and these stories deal with people on both sides of the border, says Larry Reed, founder of Shadowlight Productions, who directed Ghosts of the River. This is Reed’s second collaboration with Solis.
“It’s interesting to do something so topical, but not to do it in a didactic or political way,” Reed said. “So often in discussion about immigration people just focus on statistics and anger, but you come away from these stories with a whole different feeling about immigration.”
Reed has been working with shadow puppets for more than 30 years.
“It’s a way of telling a story that’s unique,” he said. “You can move to any culture. It’s a very digital form that follows filming rules.”
Art director Favianna Rodriguez, an Oakland-based silk-screen artist and printmaker, enjoyed that aspect of working with shadows, which was new for her.
“It’s almost like film with a lot of movement,” she said. “But it’s so low tech. For example I have a close up of somebody falling off a bridge and a train is getting closer.
In film you’d need a huge budget, but with shadow puppets all I had to do was cut out a train.”
Rodriguez, the daughter of immigrants, says she liked working on the subject matter of the stories.
“They point to very large social issues,” she said. “But they talk about those issues in a way people can understand. Art is a key way to communicate what is happening in the world.”
Ghosts of the River is at the Brava Theater from Oct. 28 through Nov. 8. Get tickets here or call (415) 641 7657.
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