Octavio Solis on 'Lydia'

May 9, 11:41 AMLA Theater Reviews ExaminerJana J. Monji

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Octavio Solis. Photo by Anne Hamersky.

Sometimes even the playwrights are surprised by their plays. Octavio Solis was when his unpolished version of "Lydia" was a hit at a teen camp and then when the finished play hit Los Angeles, making its Los Angeles premiere at the Mark Taper Forum.

Speaking over the phone from Oregon where he was preparing an adaptation of Book One of Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote de la Mancha" for the Shakespeare Festival, he was both passionate and philosophical.

"Almost across the board, for the Denver production and the Yale Rep production, it got really lovely reviews," he said. "Denver Center was where it premiered a year ago and then almost a year later at the Yale Rep. Los Angeles has been a different story. The majority of reviews have been very good, but the two or three that really counted, the ones what might have brought in the theater-going audience that relies on reviews, they were disappointing." While Solis doesn't like to respond to critics, he, like the director, Juliette Carrillo, was peeved that the play was compared to a telenovela.


"It's racism," he stated. "It's the way they think of Latino culture...and it only happened in Los Angeles. It completely surprised me because I thought here (Los Angeles), people would understand Latino culture. The telenovelas are melodramas with buff guys. The girls walk around in mini skirts. They are all rich and seldom are the actors of the Indian-looking type of Mexican." To be clear, those specific theater critics were attending previews while the actors were still adjusting to the space and rhythms at the Mark Taper Forum.

"Lydia" is about how an undocumented worker, Lydia, working as a maid, drags out many skeletons from a Latino family's closet that often relate to the sexual desires and guilt and how those two things are connected to the brain-damaged young Ceci, the only daughter.

Solis isn't even a fan of telenovelas and certainly didn't set out to write anything like the stereotypical telenovela. Conversely, Solis also doesn't consider himself a writer for teen audiences. When the rough and very long version of the play was read at the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts Camp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Solis was nervous.

"I was extremely alarmed," Solis recalled. "The audience was not Latino. They were 14 to 17 years old. They had to sign a waiver that they wouldn't sue. I thought they would be quickly turn off by it. Yet they were rapt. At the end, they were screaming their approval. They really connected." He added, "Girls were saying, that's me; that's my family, too."

In response to criticism that the moments of sexuality are discordant and perhaps even gratuitous, Solis responded, "Of course, it's jarring.I don't want to give away the ending; it might immediately shut people off or, at the other extreme, or people might sit through the play anticipating the controversial scenes. It was absolutely necessary to include these charged mometns of sexuality. They weren't written for shock value. I don't know what that means any more especially when you have reality TV, and what you see in the movies and TV. In 'Lydia,' nothing in there was gratuitous. Everything works according to the morality of the house. You have to buy into the mores of that house. For a lot of audience members, it is entirely too familiar to them and they don't want to go there."

And how do we get love when we can't ask for it? "The character (Ceci) who is on stage 90 percent of the time, who is for all intensive purposes a vegetable, is someone we have access to, emotional access," Solis explained. "She is craving some contact some sexual love, some kind of human touch. It's horrible that she never gets it. That's hard for people to sit to take without some humor. If you're going to take people to the dark side of a family and open the closet, you'd better make them laugh."

According to Solis, "Lydia" is about "how do you come to terms with  this double-edged sword called desire. Every adult in that house has been a teenager. Teenagers are a subculture. They feel different; they act different; they may as well be a tribe in Indonesia. They have their own rules, their own way of thinking and being, and when they grow out of it, adolescence seems like such an alien thing. Of course, they are overwrought. Everything is keenly, keenly, keenly felt. It's a time when the world matters most and also when the world, the weather and the gods are responding to their own issues and problems. Every teenager feels he is the center of his universe. They don't know that that's the way they are reacting. The audience has been prepared for from the very first scene."

Teenagers are sometimes skittish when addressing love and sex. Solis explained, "I've been to plays when Romeo and Juliet or other lovers kiss and the teenagers are all going,  'Woo-wooo.' They make fun of the performers because it doesn't reflect how they were feeling. Yet with 'Lydia,' one group, the majority had never seen a play before, attended a late preview. As soon as Ceci started talking they were hooting. When Lydia first appeared, within half an hour, they were quiet. They started laughing where they should laugh. They were listening and crying. As soon Misha got the belt from the dad, they said, 'That's me.' Then everything changed."

Yet "Lydia" is also about a particular culture. Solis said, "Latino teens come and see their families depicted on stage like they have never been depicted before, particularly around what it meant to be gay in the early 1970s. That couldn't be spoken of, and that couldn't be talked about ever. That was a different time. The word gay didn't permeate the Latino communities until far later than that. In some places, that's actually still true and nothing's changed and gay Latinos still hide it."

Solis also stated, "I didn't write it for a specific audience. I wrote it for myself. That so many people are relating to it on every level, not just teenagers, is very comforting. It has universals that speak to the human heart. I was surprised that so many teens were getting it." Still Solis considers "Lydia" "definitely a play for an adult mindset and not for children" because it is about "the mysterious healing power of sexuality, especially for teenagers."

Despite the warnings about content from reviews and even the Mark Taper Forum itself, "Lydia" is finding an audience. Solis gets emails, notes and letters daily remarking on the play's effect on them.