By Tony Procell with Contribution by Michaela Esparza
Wandering through a bookstore, your fingers lightly graze the smooth edges of book spines peering out from within bookshelves. The force of literature stops you in your tracks. Your eyes trail down to where your fingers stop. A desert brown book spine glances back at you. You gently slide the book from its comfy little spot on the shelf and plop it down on a table. You flip from page to page, reading bits and pieces here and there, completely drawn in by Octavio Solis’s memoir, Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border, a book of prose filled with memories, happenings, musings, and stories that take you to the inner core of El Paso, Texas. However, before Octavio Solis, the prose writer, there was Octavio Solis, the playwright.
Octavio Solis, native of El Paso, Texas, and born in 1958, is a multi-talented writer who wanders this earth with success trailing right behind him, having authored awardwinning plays that have established themselves in the theater world nationwide. Regarded by some as the Arthur Miller of our time, Solis’s plays, such as Lydia, El Paso Blue, Man of the Flesh, and others, have been produced by festivals and theater companies as early as 1988 to high acclaim.
Image caption: Octavio Solis. Courtesy of Octavio Solis.
His mother and father, Mexican immigrants, settled near downtown El Paso on Paisano Street near the firehouse. He fondly recalls his grandmother taking him to see the bomberos, the fire fighters. Solis’s father worked at the Hamburger Inn for many years and at Chico’s Tacos, an iconic El Paso eatery. His mother cleaned houses for a good part of her life until she had her children. Eventually, she got a job running the soda fountains at Gunning Castille, a now defunct pharmacy and dime store. They were impoverished working-class parents, raising five children total, a sixth child sadly dying in infancy.
Solis says he and his siblings did not know what poverty was, but he now recognizes how very poor they were. He also says that as a child, at one point living near the river and seeing people coming across it, he did not understand what he calls “the concept – the cat-and-mouse game played between people coming across surreptitiously and the border patrol. But we quickly caught on and became part of the whole dynamic of living on the border.” He tells Eva Trieger of the San Diego Jewish World that he “feels the issues facing Latinos have not changed. He doesn’t anticipate that they will change until Mexicans claim the majority population of the United States. ‘The border will never change. Through every administration from Johnson, Clinton, Bush, the culture spawned by friction has been created by the border.’”
Early on, Solis became “stagebit” and decided to become an actor, studying acting in high school. During his sophomore year at Riverside High School in El Paso, helping in the production of Diary of Anne Frank, Solis was cajoled to be it in, and he “fell in love with theater, and I fell in love with the community, that family that we forged in our rehearsals. I fell in love with the drama club and everything that it did, that it represented.” That led him to Trinity University in San Antonio, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts, and then to Trinity University’s off-campus program at the Dallas Theater Center for his Master of Fine Arts. The Los Angeles Times reports that “fresh out of school, he was cast in a production of Eric Overmyer’s ‘Native Speech’ in Dallas. It proved a turning point. ‘Instead of thinking I wanted to act in plays like this,’ Solis says, ‘I started to think I wanted to write plays like this.’” Working at the 500 Café, a punk bar in Dallas, Solis took his plays to the bar and performed them there. That “was a big turning point… big,” Solis says, when people started thinking of him as a writer rather than an actor.
In 1988-89, Maria Irene Fornes and South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, run by Jose Cruz Gonzalez, accepted Solis to participate in a workshop, a golden opportunity. The Los Angeles Times writes that Solis “became part of a budding movement that would change American regional theater. The late 1980s saw the blossoming of multiculturalism: a proliferation of culturally and ethnically specific workshops, playwriting labs, and other development initiatives, supported by government and private sources.” Solis tells the Los Angeles Times, “I’m lucky in the sense that I was a product of that. I think the artistic directors who embraced it all believed in it, and they had tremendous funding for it. But when the money dried up, it became very hard for the theaters to continue.” Eventually, Solis felt California would be a better place to partake in the “Mexican American experience.”
Playwriting doesn’t end after what some may deem the final draft. Solis deeply involves himself in casting, especially for the first production. His contract gives him casting approval and requires him to attend rehearsals. “The theaters want me there because they want the actors and the directors to be able to turn to me and say, ‘Are we doing it? Is this what you think?’ Or ‘What does this line mean?’” Solis describes it as a “collaborative process.”
Writing can be intimidating, but playwriting, Solis says, is “not for the faint of heart, and you better have thick skin, because you may not succeed on your first production. You might fall flat on your face. But if you have to do it your way, if you have to try out your ideas, you are respected. You have earned respect.”
Solis’s plays have been produced in colleges, small companies, and big companies, and performed at the Magik Theater in San Antonio, Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the San Diego Repertory Theater, South Coast Repertory in Orange County, the Magic Theater in San Francisco, the Dallas Theater Center, the Houston Alley Theater, the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, the Pacific Coast Conservatory Theater, and “everywhere, everywhere,” including in his native home at the University of Texas at El Paso. Solis sweetly refers to his plays as “all my children, so I think of them as special, and, like I do with my dogs, I whisper to him and tell him, ‘You are my favorite’ and then I will turn to the other dog and whisper in her ear, ‘You are my favorite.’” However, by the volume of excerpts Solis has read publicly, “it seems to me Lydia is a play that is very much representative of my work.”
In “The Rumpus Interview with Octavio Solis,” Emily Wilson writes in 2013 that Lydia is “very funny, but incredibly dark and disturbing – the border and the Rio Grande are powerful images.” Solis admits the play is inspired by night terrors and being a parent. Jan Breslauer of the Los Angeles Times in 2009 explains in “In Reality, Octavio Solis Mines a New Vein” that Lydia is “set in El Paso in the 1970s. [It] portrays the saga of the Flores family, whose teenage daughter, Ceci, has been disabled in a horrific accident. Into this household of troubled souls and buried secrets enters an undocumented caretaker who shares a mysterious connection with Ceci.” Breslauer asserts that Lydia is a breakthrough and a departure for Solis, known for poetic, lyrical language in plays that are typically not tied to any setting.
The heightened language is still present in Lydia but so, too, is realism.” Solis remarks, “It’s my first real true family play inside a house. This is one where everything is happening inside four walls and within a compressed period, often in real-time. I’ve written the kind of play I said I would never write. This is probably my most personal work. I felt compelled to write about a family in the realistic language I grew up with.”
Image caption: Octavio Solis. Courtesy of Octavio Solis.
James Bundy, dean of Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, argues:
That combination of the emotional and the intellectual, the intimate and the dramatic, is what some feel gives Lydia its power. It’s a domestic drama, but the language and the theatrical idiom are anything but domestic – the way the combination of Spanish and English in the play is both comforting and jarring; the shifts in tone and mode are exhilarating, and the mysteries of the story stay with you long after you’ve read or seen it. It’s one of the most important plays of this decade.
Solis, a first-generation Mexican American, carries his borderland life in him. The border is part of who he is; it never goes away. “The Rio is inside of me, so it doesn’t matter where I go – Alaska, Ireland, Australia, wherever – I still am a border kid. You can’t leave the border.” Feeling some have labeled him a “Latino playwright,” Solis does not think of himself as such. He argues he writes for the theater. He tells Wilson during the Rumpus Interview in 2013, “Because of my upbringing and my past, I inevitably delve into issues of my Latino heritage, but it’s not my Latino-ness that dictates what I write. There are stories taking place along the border near El Paso because that’s where I am from and because I think that region is full of untold stories. But even as many of my characters are of Mexican descent, I feel that their tales are universal stories of love and betrayal and loss.”
Solis grapples with the term “Latino playwright” and its implications. He admits to Wilson, “Sometimes it means I am appreciated more but only within this rubric, and sometimes it makes me visible to a wider audience with no access to the culture. So, there are benefits and pitfalls. Still, if I don’t tell these stories about the people I share my culture with, someone else will. So, I feel a responsibility to share what I can.”
In his recent work, Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border, Solis turns from playwriting to prose, a switch he makes look easy. In Retablos, a memoir about growing up Latino on the US/México border, Solis takes an emotional, traumatic, and downright painful ride through his childhood memories. As readers, we are taken through traumatic and lifechanging moments in his life, which he calls retablos, a form of devotional art, usually painted on tin or wood, where a dire event is displayed (a crime, an illness, and general trauma) and the person in the painting survives because of divine intervention. Solis interprets these moments as retablos because of experiences he has overcome. He says of Retablos, “I feel it’s something verging on the divine, though not the divine we are taught to believe in.” The stories, emotional and poetic, give insight into living along the border. Solis jotted down what he describes as “little dreams,” a ten-year endeavor. He says, “I had been working on a play, and I still had energy, and before bed I thought, I have this idea. It’s in my head, and I think it’s a dream, but I also wonder if it really happened. I think it really happened.”
Retablos contains stories from blowing up frogs to having an encounter with a young prostitute “who was very pregnant,” to, says The New York Times, growing up “just a mile from the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas…he tells stories about his childhood and coming of age, including his parents’ migration to the United States from Mexico, his fi rst encounter with racism and fi nding a Mexican migrant girl hiding in the cotton fi elds.” Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin, says of Retablos, “This is American and Mexican literature a stone’s throw from the always hustling El Paso border.” Solis feels that the stories, childhood rituals and rites of passage, “dreamlike” and “surreal,” are attracting the attention of young people and people who are not of Latinx background and “I have sort of hit a nerve and found something more universal.”
Solis has retired, maybe temporarily, from playwriting and the theater but continues to enjoy the aspect of writing and storytelling. He plans to continue with fi ction. Adding to his accomplishments, Solis recently worked on the hit Disney film Coco. He was hired to do a table read as a voice actor, but soon after the CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) was in place, he was offered a cultural consultant position and a small voice acting role. Solis often muses about being asked if he is famous:
They say, “Are you someone famous?” “Yes. I wrote a book called Retablos, and I am a playwright. I have been writing plays across the country for the last 40 years.” “Oh, okay. Okay.” And they start to get this blank look. And then all I have to say, “And I worked on Coco.” “I want your autograph.” So, it’s almost like it doesn’t matter what else I did. If I mention Coco, that’s who I am.
Solis works hard on reinventing his style, hence, Retablos. He emphasizes lyrical language, “language that seems both profane and realistic but can soar and sound almost angelic and kind of poetic. Those things don’t change,” he tells Wilson in the Rumpus interview. A fan of poetry and fi ction of the likes of John Steinbeck, Emily Dickenson, Eagar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner, and having studied Shakespeare, Solis can only churn out what are sure to become classics. Whether Octavio Solis ever returns to playwriting is unknown. He may very well become the next Samuel Becket or William Butler Yeats, or Shakespeare, “who wrote those plays and then wrote those astonishing sonnets.” Still, if Retablos is any indication of the direction he will traverse, the audience, Latino or otherwise, is in for inspired reading.
