Rough Crossing

About Lydia

Mining Memory

 

Production Dramaturg Matt Cornish sat down with playwright Octavio Solis and director Juliette Carrillo during rehearsals for Yale Rep’s production of Lydia.

 

Matt Cornish: Octavio, how did you begin writing Lydia?

Octavio Solis: Well, for a long time I had the final image in the play in my head. Eventually other images started to gather, moving like plate tectonics toward each other, like drifting continents, to form this house. I trusted those images and let the writing guide me from image to image: like connecting the dots, like a constellation of the final big pictures.

MC: As these images and thoughts began to come together, what excited you most about the process of writing the play?

OS: Going home to El Paso. To my house. I have six, seven, maybe even eight plays set in and around El Paso. I have a lot of issues that I want to resolve in that town. Not only because it’s my hometown, but because El Paso’s a crucible of cultures. All these people are caught up in that, including my parents, my grandparents, and myself. So, it was important to go there, but what was even more exciting was going directly into the world of my past, my personal past, having access to it, and using it in a way that I felt before I couldn’t do before. Memories I didn’t even know I had were coming up.

MC: How did you use memory to tell your story?

OS: One of things I sort of landed on, never having planned it, was that I put the biggest secrets inside Ceci, inside the soul of a person who can’t communicate with anybody. They’re somewhere in there; she’s doing this detective work. She knows someone messed up big time, and she wants to get to the bottom of it. But when she does, how does she tell the family because she can’t communicate? That’s where Lydia comes in, and she says, "Tell me, I’ll translate." At that point, the two of them became fused, and I knew what the play was about, and what I had to do. But up till then, I didn’t know. And part of that, I think, is what’s happening to me. Lydia is interpreting for me things and memories that I can’t really articulate myself.

MC: Juliette, when you first got the script and you did your initial read-through, what was it that grabbed your attention about the world and characters of Lydia?

Juliette Carrillo: I felt that the characters were all extremely compelling, and part of that was because they are so well rounded and well drawn. I knew who these people were and what their relationships were right from the beginning—they are complicated and mysterious, and I felt the courage in the play. I felt the heart in the play, and I felt the spirituality in the play too.

MC: How did you begin to crack open the world so that you could put it on stage?

OS: Juliette called me up!

JC: Exactly. We talked for hours and hours and hours. Even though this isn’t my family and the events aren’t anywhere close to what I’ve experienced, I think it’s an everyman’s family or everywoman’s family. We all understand what it’s like to hold pain in our bodies and to not say things we think should be said. We all understand what it’s like to be in a family, no matter what kind of family it is.

MC: How do you think that this play resonates with the Hispanic experience, particularly the Mexican American experience?

OS: It really feels like a play of the border. 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. Each individual family member has an opinion about that. For some, there’s a sense of contention, as one of the characters says, he wants everyone in the house to speak God’s language, and that’s Spanish. For others, it’s a dream to be able to learn English and become more American. I think both those impulses exist in me and my family and exist in all the families that live along the border.

JC: To me, this play is not about just the Mexican American experience. That’s a nuance of the play—not its essence.

OS: It’s important that Lydia is set in the seventies, and America was going through many huge transitions. With the sexual revolution came activism: the gay movement, the feminist movement, the migrant farm workers movement, the civil rights movement. The Vietnam War is happening at the same time. All these are reflected in the play in some way.

MC: The title of the play is Lydia, but she’s not necessarily the protagonist. Who is this mysterious figure?

OS: It’s a question that gets asked a lot, but nobody really asks me directly. Is Lydia real? Is she an angel, or is she evil? Instead of coming in and making everything right, she walks in and really bad things start to happen. My answer is that she’s just a girl who wants to rock in the free world. 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. If she is only magical, an angel or something, then what happens to her doesn’t matter in a way.

MC: Octavio and Juliette, this is your second production of Lydia. It premiered at Denver Theatre Center about a year ago. How have you approached the play for this new production at Yale Rep? What are you learning from the process?

JC: This is the kind of play that, every time you read it, you get more out of it. There’s a lot in it that we still don’t understand. I’m excited about the layers we’re putting in, and I feel like we are respecting the work that we’ve done over the past year but reinvestigating it with new eyes.