Stephanie Beatriz as the title character in Denver Center Theatre Company's production of "Lydia"
After seeing one of Octavio Solis’s plays, one audience member asked Solis’s set designer, “Is Octavio a happy man?”
“Oh yes,” replied the designer. “You see, that’s him over there—smiling.”
“Then how,” asked the audience member, “can such a dark story come out of him?”
Solis, well known for his brooding and intense human dramas did not scare away Denver Center Theatre Company Artistic Director Kent Thompson, who commissioned Lydia from Solis a little more than a year ago. The play is enjoying its world premiere as part of the DCTC’s 3rd Colorado New Play Summit.
“I think it’s part of our culture as Mexicans,” Solis said. “I’m attracted to death in a weird way.”
Solis grew up in El Paso, where many of his plays, including Lydia, take place. The El Paso of this play is confined to one family’s living room, during the wintertime, in the early 1970s. The effect is claustrophobic. The set is decked in dark wood paneling and lit by dark yellow lamplight. And there, in the middle of the umber-colored shag carpeting, lays the family’s dark shame: the tragic and terrifically disabled daughter, Ceci.
Solis’s story is a rigorous character study of one family’s pain, playing on the images of the Mexican lotería and the theme of chance, where one freak accident changes the world. To be sure, calling it a dark play would be gross understatement. But from the darkest struggles come the brightest redemptions.
The title character, portrayed with hypnotic grace by Stephanie Beatriz, crosses over from Mexico to help the family care for Ceci. Lydia is an old world force of nature. She has connection to the spirit realm—a curandera with a troubling secret. One by one, beginning with Ceci, Lydia seduces the entire family, even the hard shelled René, played by René Millán (looking so much like a younger Jesse Borrego), in a part Solis said he wrote with the actor in mind.
Lydia’s almost supernatural synchronicity with Ceci ultimately pits her against the family as the tension between the old world and the new world boils up and over. René to Lydia:
We’re just like you, but watered down.
Director Juliette Carrillo, whose repertoire includes world and regional premiers by José Rivera and Sam Shepard, moves Solis’s dense script along at a gripping pace. By the end of Act 1, the tension sits like a heavy smog on the air. There was much twitching in the seats and touching knuckles to teeth. One old man was helped out of the theater by paramedics.
So why subject yourself to this family’s great suffering? Because the story is miraculous, and the acting is heart wrenching. This is the kind of American theater students will be contemplating decades from now. And like the very best theater, Lydia challenges our complacency by reflecting to us our flawed humanity.
Onahoua Rodriguez as Ceci and Carlo Albán as Misha in the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of "Lydia"
At the final curtain, the audience is left alone with Ceci (Onahoua Rodriguez) and her beloved brother Misha (Carlo Albán) in the bravest acting I have ever witnessed.
Is it a bright redemption then, in the end, with Ceci lit like a shimmering angel by a solitary spotlight?
No indeed. It is a dark redemption.
Catch Lydia at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Ricketson Theatre, January 18 – March 1. And visit www.denvercenter.org for more information.
All photos by Terry Shapiro courtesy of Denver Center for the Performing Arts
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