About Lydia

• Remembering Chris Webb: 1973-2008
• A Note from The artistic director
• Border Play
• Close my eyes and you're there:
  A Poem by Octavio Solis
• LOTERÍA: La Vida Cecilia
• Slanglish Glossary
• Mining Memory: An Interview with Octavio Solis and Juliette Carrillo

Border Play

Located in far western Texas, on the northern banks of the Rio Grande across from Juárez, Mexico, and in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, El Paso is a border city both in psychology and geography. It has long been the locus of cultural collisions, mixing new arrivals from south of the border, the children of legal and illegal immigrants, other American citizens who have moved to the city following jobs, and the descendants of Spanish settlers who have lived in the area for centuries. From the unforgiving but beautiful landscape, a bustling metropolis emerged after World War II with a strong economy built on manufacturing, the military, and trade with Mexico.

Playwright Octavio Solis was born and raised in El Paso, and it is to his hometown that he has returned for the setting of several plays, including El Paso Blue (1994) and his new play Lydia, which received its world premiere in Denver in early 2008. In Lydia, Solis captures the volatile and rapidly changing El Paso of the 1970s: a city experiencing an influx of soldiers and immigrants through a permeable national border but also struggling, like all of America, with the Vietnam War, the draft, generational conflict, and the burgeoning civil rights movement.

While tensions rage on a national scale, the living room of the Flores home has for years been the scene of a tragedy unfolding in slow motion. It began with the car accident that crippled Ceci just days before her quinceañera, her fifteenth-birthday celebration. Her older brother Rene, who was behind the wheel, battles his family and the world, struggling to come to terms with the fallout of that night. Her father Claudio drinks too much and cannot connect to the family that her mother Rosa and younger brother Misha desperately try to hold together. There they remain, in a house on the border between America and Mexico, and between life and death, stuck in the everyday routines of survival—until Lydia arrives.

—Matt Cornish, Production Dramaturg