"It's a dark, dark play," Octavio Solis told American Theater magazine in an interview accompanying their publication of his muy-dysfunctional family drama, Lydia. "I went all the way to the bottom and came back out." In doing so, he's crafted a sprawling work that offsets squalid realism with poetic flights of fantasy, integrates critiques of religion, 1970s politics, immigration policy and sexual repression; investigates issues of sibling rivalry, care for the disabled, spousal abuse, incest, culpability and euthanasia, and runs just short of three hours. That Solis plunged into all this deeply personal (though not directly autobiographical) material and emerged with an absorbing play that, against many odds, doesn't fall to pieces, resounds to his credit. Whether audiences pummeled by Lydia's bleakness and violence will feel the journey is as worth it for them as it appears to be for him is another matter.
At the close of Center Theater Group's current production of the work, I overheard several other critics--in town to take part in the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater -- jokingly reference Long Day's Journey Into Night. The parallels are not unwarranted, even if Solis adds tons more baggage to his journey. Both works deal with difficult fathers, clueless mothers and tormented brothers, one of whom is a sensitive wannabe writer, the other tough-skinned but pickling himself rather than face his self-loathing. Both also toss their characters into an ocean of guilt over a past tragedy; no matter how they try to swim away, some argument or memory will pull them back.
For the Flores family of El Paso, Texas, the reminder is right there in their green-carpeted living room: 17-year-old daughter Ceci (Onahoua Rodriguez), severely brain-damaged in an accident and cared for piously by younger brother Misha (Carlo Alban) and somewhat haphazardly by mother Rosa (Catalina Maynard). A devout Catholic, she'd sooner trust God than modern medicine to heal Ceci, even though religion hasn't kept Rosa's husband Claudio (Daniel Zacapa) from using his fists on her and the boys whenever he senses so much as a twinge of disobedience. Into this domestic hell and not a moment too soon arrives Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz), a breezy, fetching maid newly arrived from Mexico and hired cheaply to minister to Ceci's needs.
Speechless and spastic, Ceci nonetheless communicates with Lydia in a way she hasn't managed with any other family member, not even sensitive Misha. The new housekeeper proves a breath of fresh air for other reasons, including giving Misha his first unrequited crush and, thus, a subject for the poems he's always writing; tempering Claudio's rage by her presence, sexuality and unwillingness to be cowed by him; and simply by neatening up the oppressive shabbiness of the Flores' apartment. When Lydia pulls the plastic covers off the lampshades and turns all the lights on, we know a long-dimmed revelation is about to be tugged from the shadows.
There are other elements, too: a cousin (Max Arciniega), once loved by Ceci, who joined the military and is now a border guard; Ceci frequently coming out of her vegetative state to address the audience in poetic language (as when she remembers the way she, her brothers and cousin would pretend to be ants when they were children); and older sibling Rene (Tony Sancho), resenting his father's brutality but beating himself up over his role in his sister's calamity.
What leaves me on the fence about the piece is that although we're given enough family drama for a miniseries (Lydia is, in fact, the first part of a trilogy), the evening feels overlong and enervating. Partly, that may be a function of venue. The Mark Taper Forum is just too big and impersonal for a work that cries out for a more lived-in space. We feel as if we're studying the Flores's anthropologically rather than living with them.
There's also just too much of a muchness here. Subtext is eschewed in favor of everybody saying not only what they want but why they psychologically want it (though, to be fair, the overwriting feels less bothersome in the script than onstage). Also, the line between vivid descriptions and tortured metaphors gets crossed more than once, as when Ceci likens her father's grasping for bygone glory to "an invisible piñata filled with stale candies."
Most of all, the play's epic ambitions fall short owing to some basic annoyances. That Solis holds back from revealing the details of Ceci's misfortune until late in act two is fine and necessary for the play's arc. But why spend act one dancing around the fact that it was a car accident since no emotional resonance is gained when that particular detail is finally revealed? Also, while Solis often makes effective use of foreshadowing (he turns the discarded pop top on a beer can into a clue, a weapon and a metaphor), it doesn't take Freud to figure out what Rene's homophobic machismo is really all about.
After a week's sojourn with critics who are all trying to figure out a balance between the amount of extra work they should be doing to help their careers with how much actual money that brings in and how much more quality time that work will sap from their lives, I couldn't help but apply that admittedly prosaic thinking to Lydia. A lot of heart and hard labor went into this play, from Solis' large-scale grappling with his demons to performers who likely had to explore some tough places in themselves to make their characters as believable as they are, to the designers who chose that particular faded coffee table, orange La-Z Boy and yellowed couch, and who show how magical flashlights can look when creating beams under hoisted bedsheets. But when it was all over, I could not answer one giant question: why have we gone through all this? Not that the time was ill-spent, not that Lydia lacked moments of power and admirable creativity, but if a play is going to spend a long night pushing my face into broken glass, I want to come out scratched instead of shrugging.
