Octavio Solis's "Lydia,' by Amaryllis

Political commentators right and left fear that 50 million Hispanic immigrants won't assimilate into American culture. Octavio Solis's Lydia inadvertently offers them some reassurance on that point.

Solis's Vietnam-era play opens in the El Paso household of a first-generation Mexican-American family started by Rosa Flores (Johanna Carden) when she planted an anchor baby in a Texas border town. Her Spanish-speaking husband Claudio (the perpetually brooding Joe Guzman) zones out to telenovelas; their gang-banger older son René gets drunk and gay bashes; and his younger brother Misha pens poems about the grackles flying in the backyard.

Their daughter Ceci (Caitlin Reilly) lies on a makeshift bed in the middle of the living room, a huge scar etched into her forehead from a car accident. The wreck left her "brains spilling onto the pavement so like many words from her heart," a line Ceci speaks during one of the many moments when she magically awakes from her vegetative state to lucidly comment upon and indirectly reveal the hidden secrets of this family.

Into this mix enters the clairvoyant Lydia (Anjoli Santiago), an illegal hired as the family's maid and Ceci's caretaker, who reads the family like the riddles of loteria cards.

Sounds familiar

Hmm. A mentally deficient daughter? A once alluring mother "losing beauty by the day"? A shy, sensitive younger son writing poetry to cope with his bitterness? Didn't we already meet these characters 67 years ago in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie?

A plot-driving interloper? Revulsion against concealed homosexuality? Didn't Williams give us that, too, in A Streetcar Named Desire?

Solis also owes his volatile family dynamic (not to mention the play's length) to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. From Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman he plucked a series of revelations sparked by an older son's witnessing his absentee father's adultery.

If this is what passes for "Hispanic literature," assimilation may turn out to be less of an ordeal than everyone thinks.

Poetry and family dysfunction

When I first saw Lydia in Los Angeles in 2009, I hated it for stirring poetry into the indigestible stew of family dysfunction. But since then its lyricism and rich use of metaphor have reverberated in my mind, and its shocking ending has stuck in my head like a nightmare.

The current Amaryllis production fulfilled my hopes to bask once again in this play's lyrical qualities. A single glance— about midway through the second act— encapsulated the strong acting of the entire production. Here, Santiago levels Carden with a look of sexual and spousal ownership. I've seen this attitude displayed in mock bravado many times on Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. Here, for the first time (and in acting, no less), I saw it made real when Santiago bared her teeth like an animal in the wild asserting its dominance.

Heartbreaking and exhausting

Jerold Forsyth's lighting design skillfully maneuvers the mood between the initially distinct, then overlapping scenes of naturalism and magic realism. Josette Todaro's direction steadies the action without sacrificing the script's insistence on lingering on the moments. Solid performances by Carden and Guzman ground the family's struggle.

But it was Reilly's heartbreaking performance as Ceci that exhausted me. In any production, Solis's words would sift out into the audience like an intoxicating mist. At Amaryllis, Reilly's portrayal of Ceci's joy, wonder and agony turned these words into emotional tethers that she tugged on for the entire evening.

Solis intends Lydia as the first part of a trilogy about Mexican-American families. The era in which he set Lydia proved a good fit for the magic realism style and the lyrical quality of his language. Whether or not he can continue to blend his heritage into the latter parts of the trilogy, while resisting full assimilation, remains to be seen.♦


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