Lydia

“Gripping, incisive, surprising and intensely poetic... 'Lydia' is electrifying. A classic family drama full of dark secrets and clashing visions of the American dream.”

“Lydia is achingly lyrical, breathtaking in its inventiveness, and heartbreaking in its view... Lydia is a remarkable, indelible work of art.”

“MTC’s production, sympathetically directed by Jasson Minadakis, is solid from top to bottom.”

“Thought-provoking entertainment in a setting that is as exotic for Marin audiences as a kabuki play.”

“The language is liquid. It floods the theatre. Foot to chin we sit in the kind of words that are rarely given a voice, breathing the crisp air that lingers between cadence and bombshell.”

• The Loteria of Lydia
• Spanglish
• Loteria
• Quinceanera
• Octavio Solis Hits the National Stage

The Lotería of Lydia
by Margot Melcon

“I wake to this. Life inside my life. No wings, no glass, no moon. Only Lotería which means Bingo which means chance which means play. So I play the cards into view.”
—Ceci in Lydia by Octavio Solis

Lotería is a game of chance. Similar to bingo, a game board is placed before you with words and images drawn from the deck of life: el borracho, the drunk; la sirena, the mermaid; el corazón, the heart; la luna, the moon; el soldado, the soldier; la muerte, death. Cards are drawn with those same images, and your game board is covered as the images match up to your fate, or they don’t. If the right combination of cards align, you cry out, “¡Lotería!”

A version of the lotería game was created by playwright Octavio Solis for Lydia and has its own set of cards drawn from the traditions of Mexico, the promise of America, and clashing cultures in the border town of El Paso, Texas. The game pulls the fate of one heartbroken family from their troubled past into their inevitable future.

La Ciudad (The City)

El Paso, Texas, lies directly across the Río Grande from Juárez, a city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The river separates the two cities, a boundary that allows the two cultures to pass fluidly into one another. People cross from their homes in America to Mexico for cheaper groceries and gas, and for Mexican Cokes that taste sweeter than the American kind. And people cross from the dangerous, often-violent Juárez into El Paso, searching for possibility and the American Dream. Though it is on the first-world side of the border, El Paso is what Solis calls, “a two-fisted town.” It is hot, dry, desert land and a tough city to grow up in.

Octavio Solis set Lydia—and several of his other plays—in the town of El Paso, where he grew up and where his parents still live. He vividly remembers the El Paso of his youth, but admits to a certain amount of poetic license when it comes to his hometown. As he told American Theatre magazine in December of last year, “I found myself in my writing going back to El Paso constantly. But the El Paso I started writing about was an El Paso of the imagination. . . . I created a myth of El Paso through my plays. They all somehow come up to the edge of the border.”

Circumstances of location, politics, poverty, and promise put El Paso in the position of being a city in the most powerful nation in the world as well as half of a larger community entangled with the culture of one of the poorest nations in the world. The one thing separating the two cultures is the border.

La Frontera (The Border)

A city on the edge of America and Mexico, El Paso feels the vast difference between the two countries nowhere more than on it’s border. The extreme poverty and lack of opportunity in Mexico inspires residents to look north toward a better life that is close but inaccessible. Solis recalls, “[The border] has always been an issue in El Paso. It’s a chimera that takes many forms.” The current border was created when countries drew a line in the sand and Mexican citizens became immigrants overnight when their homes were suddenly in American territory.

The border is a state of mind as much as it is a line drawn between two states. An immigrant crossing over has as much a mental and emotional journey as a physical one. Many immigrants who cross into America from Mexico find themselves questioning their identity; the hyphenated definition of Mexican-American doesn’t truly describe who they are and they struggle to reconcile the desire for a better life with pride in the land left behind.

Almost everyone claiming America as his or her home can trace a system of roots back to somewhere else. Whether coming by choice or by force, seeking possibility or escape, once they’re here a sense of who they are in this new community begins to emerge. An immigrant can plunge into all things American, can cling fiercely to the old country, or can find a new way that is neither one nor the other but a balance between future and past. When the window of your new home looks out across the place you left behind, the opposition of being part of two worlds feels very real.

“[Lydia] really feels like a play of the border,” commented Solis before the play’s recent production at Yale Repertory Theatre. “It depicts a family, a culture between two ways of being, two ways of life. And it shows that struggle, that tension, between wanting to belong, to really fully immerse oneself in the new culture, and at the same time not wanting to let go of the prior culture. . . . I think both those impulses exist in me and my family and exist in all the families that live along the border.”

La Familia (The Family)

The question of assimilation is universal to all immigrant families, though many of the problems facing the Flores family in Lydia are specific to the Mexican immigrant community. The discussion of legal and illegal status divides families. An ugly stigma is attached to people coming illegally over the border that runs along the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. An even uglier stigma is attached to the people from the immigrant community who choose to police their own and enlist in the Border Patrol. The work that is available to first-generation Americans is hard and often harder to come by, and there is an obligation to family members left in Mexico. While many immigrants in America have it rough, they have it better than their relatives who did not make it over the border.

Though they are a Mexican immigrant family living in a border town, the Flores family looks very much like any other American family enduring many of the same challenges. The parents sacrifice to create opportunities they never had so their children will have a better life. The son stands up to his father for the first time. The father is unable to comprehend the angry young man his son has become. The parents face enormous grief when their only daughter nearly dies in a tragic accident, only to survive to live a shadow of the life they’d hoped for her.

El Sueño Americano (The American Dream)

In the tradition of the immigrant family searching for the American Dream, Solis has introduced a story that is both familiar and unique. On the surface, there may not be much resemblance between the Flores family in Lydia and the Tyrone family in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the Loman family in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, or the Tate family in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, but underneath the origin of their name or the town they live in, there is a sameness that echoes in all these stories.

Solis says of the title character of his play, “She wants to come to America and live the dream, she wants to learn English, she wants to work, get a job. If this is an ‘every-person’ kind of play, she’s the every-immigrant.” For Lydia, her success is tied to the Flores family, and in the greater sense, it is tied to the success of every family that has come to America. Your family is the people and country you are born to. Your family is also the people with whom you share a vision, and there is a family in this country made of people searching for the American Dream.

Spanglish

In Lydia, the characters speak a fluid mix of English, and Mexican/Texan Spanish that, in part, has come to be known as Spanglish—a switching between idiomas to find the best expression of emotions and culture. The following are some Spanish words you will hear mixed in with English in the dialogue of Lydia.

• abuela: grandmother
• amantes: lovers
• ¡andalé!: come on!
• baboso: asshole
• bailamos: let’s dance
• campo santo: cemetery
• carnala/carnal: blood related sister/brother
• cerveza: beer
• cholo: slang for teenager who dresses in jeans and a spotless white t-shirt and often sports tattoos
• contestame: answer me!
• corralón: dentention center for illegal immigrants
• criada: maid
• ¡Dios mio!: my God!
• espera: wait
• el otro lado: the other side
• idioma: language
• inútil: useless
• jefe: boss
• labio: lip
• lo dudo: I doubt it
• madre: mother
• mesero: waiter
• mierda: shit
• migra: slang for the Border Patrol (migración)
• m’ija/m’ijo: conjunction for my daughter/my son (mi hija/mi hijo)
• mira: look
• molé: a spicy cocoa-based sauce
• mojada/mojado: “wetback,” illegal immigrant
• noche: night
• no mames guey: don’t joke man
• no hables asi: don’t talk like that
• no te apures: don’t rush
• no tienes hambre: you aren’t hungry
• novelas: soap operas
• oye: listen
• pajarita: little bird
• pecados: sins
• pendejos: idiots
• pinche: damn
• placer: pleasure
• prima/primo: cousin
• puta: prostitute
• qué dices?: what did you say?
• que Dios te cuide: may God protect you
• que has hecho?: what have you done
• que más: what more
• querida: darling
• quinceañera: a woman’s coming-of-age celebration of her 15th birthday
• raza unida: united race
• sabes: you know
• sangrita: blood
• sobrino: nephew
• te quiero: I love you, I want you
• te voy a matar: I’m going to kill you
• tía/tío: aunt/uncle
• tranquilo: quiet
• trucha: police
• vamanos: let’s go
• vas a ver: you’ll see
• verdad: true
• vestido: dress
• vieja/Viejo: old woman/old man
• vete!: go!
  

Lotería

Lotería is a Mexican game of chance, similar to Bingo, but using images on a deck of cards instead of numbers on ping pong balls. Every image has a name and an assigned number, but the number is usually ignored. Each player has at least one tabla, a board with a randomly created 4 x 4 grid of pictures with their corresponding name and number. Each player chooses the tabla they want to play with from a variety of previously created tablas. Each one presents a different selection of images.

The lotería is composed of a set of 54 different images, each one in a card. To start the game, the caller randomly selects a card from the deck and announces it to the players by its name, sometimes using a riddle instead of reading the card name. The players with a matching pictogram on their board mark it off with a chip or other kind of marker (many Mexican families traditionally use small rocks, soda corks or pinto beans as markers). The first player with four chips in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row, squared pattern, any other previously specified pattern, or fills the tabla first shouts "¡Lotería!" or "¡Buena!" and is the winner.

Quinceañera

The transition from childhood to womanhood is a significant passage for adolescent girls in almost all cultures. In Mexico, it is marked with the celebration of the Quinceañera, or 15th birthday. From a north-of-the-border viewpoint, it may be seen as a cross between Sweet Sixteen and a debutante's coming out party, or similar to a bar or bat mitzvah in the Jewish community. The celebration is a way to acknowledge that a young woman has reached sexual maturity and is of a marriageable age.

The most important component of the celebration is a Mass. The birthday girl arrives formal dress. Flanked by her parents and padrinos (godparents), she is seated at the foot of the altar throughout the service. She may be accompanied by up to seven damas (maids of honor) and as many chambelanes (chamberlains), selected from among close family and friends.

At the end of the mass younger sisters, cousins, and friends pass out bolos (commemorative favors) to those in attendance, while the quinceañera deposits her bouquet on the altar or in a niche honoring the Virgin Mary, most often that of the ubiquitous Virgen de Guadalupe.

The quinceañera traditionally further celebrates the occasion with either a viaje (journey) or a fiesta (party). While a trip to Paris and other European destinations was once popular, recently young women of all social classes generally throw the party, complete with live music. The degree of opulence of the event is directly related to the economic means of the girl's parents and godparents. To cover the multiple expenses, a host of padrinos and madrinas may be invited to sponsor, respectively, the dress, the music, the location, the bar, the cake, and the table favors.

The culminating moment comes when the festejada (celebrant) and her chambelán (escort) dance a traditional ballroom waltz called a vals. This dance tradition is based on a mixture of Mexican, French, Spanish and English ballroom dances. The chambelán initiates the Vals by requesting a dance with the Quinceañera to a classical song, followed by dances requested with her by her father or another close male relative such as an uncle or older brother, and then her Godfather. Some Latino cultures have the girl's first dance begin with her father as her partner who is then cut in on by her escort.

Other highlights include a customary toast and the cutting of a multi-tiered birthday cake. The girl will sometimes be presented with a tiara, a rosary, a bible, or a piece of jewelry from her parents. One of the most popular customs is the changing of the shoes. The father or favored male relative ceremoniously changes the young girl’s flat shoes to high heels as a symbol of the quinceañera’s transformation from a little girl to a young lady. Another custom is the last doll as part of the ceremony or as decoration and keepsake. The doll is presented to the quinceañera representing the passing of childish things in favor of more womanly pastimes.

The quinceañera dress is perhaps the most important part of the event for the celebrant. The dress carries the significance of beauty, purity, adulthood, glamour, and sophistication. The dresses usually have full skirts, tight bodices, and excessive embellishment, and are either white or pastel. In the past, quinceañera dresses could also be used as wedding dresses.

The origins of Mexico's quinceañera celebrations remain obscure, although the roots may have begun with the Aztecs where it was traditional for the parents of a young Aztec maiden to formally acknowledge her passage into womanhood. Regardless of how the tradition originated, regardless of the relentless onslaught of gringo culture prevalent today, the celebration of the quinceañera remains as one of the rites of passage that keeps the bonds of the Mexican family firmly cemented.

Octavio Solis Hits the National Stage
by Nirmala Nataraj

This article appeared in the March 2008 issue of Theatre Bay Area Magazine.

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.

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A preview of Lydia production featuring cast and set.

'Lydia', the story in Loteria cards