cover photo by Jenny Graham
This collection contains three
full-length plays: SANTOS & SANTOS, EL PASO BLUE and EL OTRO:
“Solis’ dark, rapturous look at the immigrant experience is not
something you’ll easily forget.
Santos is an ambitious work filled with hard, beautiful, and
profane language.... Sometimes I voluntarily stopped breathing for a few seconds
so I could better hear the monologues of the three brothers.”
Nora Fitzgerald, Observer (Dallas)
“SANTOS & SANTOS...wrings you out with the thoroughness of a plot
that leaves no-one unscathed by ‘the wounds that bind us’.
The play remains fascinating and surprising to the end. It’s a gripping,
dismaying and bleakly funny vision of how much America offers and how much it
can take away.”
Steven Winn, Chronicle (San Francisco)
“EL OTRO…is…brightly nightmarish, frighteningly comic, mystifying
and downright entertaining….
Densely but colloquially poetic, convoluted but eerily
straightforward, filled with delightfully unexpected turns of plot and phrase,
it’s yet another impressive outing from one of the Bay Area’s most reliably
inventive playwrights.
…like most of Solis’ plays, deeply concerned with issues of
identity, on ethnic, family and purely personal levels. It’s frightening, in its
off-handed incidents of domestic abuse and fatal violence, and excruciatingly
funny at the same time.”
Robert Hurwitt, Examiner (San Francisco)
“Shuffling its time and space scheme into overlapping segments,
BLUE keeps shifting its tone and temperament. It’s part C & W grand opera, part
Oedipal tragedy, and part buddies-on-the-road saga with a mysterious woman along
for the ride.
EL PASO BLUE operates in the strange and often fascinating
theatrical realm as the story plunges toward a confrontation between husband and
wife, father and son, blood and blood, the alluring Mexican darkness of Al and
Jefe and the blinding light
of Sylvie with her white skin and blonde hair.”
Steven Winn, Chronicle
“Forget the lack of horses or the contemporary urban setting. EL
PASO BLUE is a deliciously mythic, grimly funny canter of a western that stands
stereotypes of the genre on their heads….
Solis enriches his action with the masterfully drawn, idiosyncratic
characters and the richly metaphoric, quirky dialogue that are becoming his
trademarks.”
Rob Hurwitt, Examiner
PLAYS BY OCTAVIO SOLIS
I S B N: 0-88145-258-0, $16.95