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There's something intense about 'Lydia' |
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Written by Andra Coberly
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Thursday, 31 January 2008 |
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“I need a cigarette,” someone mutters as a wide-eyed audience pours from the comfortable downstairs theater in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It appears to reflect the feeling of the departing crowd — which exhales with a unified “Wow” as they throw on their winter coats — that has been so moved and shaken and stirred throughout the two-and-a-half-hour world-premiere of “Lydia” in The Ricketson Theatre.
And I don’t even smoke.
“Lydia” leaves you changed. It leaves you wanting to spend the night talking about the people you just met and then knew so well and the actors who transform the stage to a window into a Texas living room. It leaves you a bit tear-stained, or a lot tear-stained, and likely pounded into a thin, soggy tortilla.
Playwright Octavio Solis has created a passionate, vigorous narrative in “Lydia.” His storytelling is hauntingly perfected as he pulls the audience into this anguished El Paso home, where guilt and anger have stifled passion and love. The cast of the Denver Center Theatre Co. is captivating and chilling as the Flores family — making Solis’ poetry into a bird that flies.
In “Lydia,” the Flores family is as dysfunctional as they come. Father Claudio (Ricardo Gutierrez) sits in his chair all day, drinking beer and throwing the tabs onto the thick shag carpet. Brother Rene (René Millán) drinks hard and comes home bloody after beating up gay men. Mother Rosa (Catalina Maynard) has turned to God and her own career. Younger brother Misha (Carlo Albán) becomes a poet and the official picker-up of beer tabs.
And sister Ceci (Onahoua Rodriguez) lays on the floor, muscles twisting, eyes rolling and brain-damaged. Just years before, Ceci was a flirty teenage girl about to turn 15. But days before her quinceanera, she is thrown from a car in an accident that will leave her family scarred and aching. In the house, secrets are everywhere — even the details of the accident are taboo — and the family seems loud but silent, with violent outbursts and sarcastic retorts. Even Ceci’s cries don’t mean much.
Until Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz) shows up. When Rosa goes back to work, she hires an illegal immigrant girl to take care of Ceci and the house. Lydia and Ceci immediately have a bond that overcomes all language and physical barriers. And as Lydia understands more and more about the family, more and more of the truth about the family’s past comes out.
And these truths hurt. The heartbreaking second half is like a sucker punch as the family and Lydia herself are ripped apart — as the anger explodes because the truth hurts much more than just not knowing. The jarring final moments — though confusing — are an eruption of long-restrained, smoldering sexuality and then silence.
And I don’t even smoke.
It’s a tragedy in its most poetic and vicious. And told with stunning skill that brings the audience in with Ceci’s glorious childlike spirit and the family’s humor and quirks and then leaves you questioning why and how this heartbreak could have happened.
The Denver cast is perfectly competent taking the family from dysfunctional to explosive — with an electric, lingering commitment to Solis’ story and characters. Rodriguez makes a revolutionary transformation, taking Ceci from wailing and spastic to a soaring, lyrical poet.
Beatriz as Lydia is magnetic and sexy, with her no-fear attitude and her assured intuition.
With Juliette Carrillo’s keen, sensitive, rock-solid direction, “Lydia,” even in its infancy as a new play, is assault by theater — in a good way. Though it is intensely emotional and at times shocking, it crosses the boundary from being just a play to becoming an intimate, incendiary experience.
And I don’t even smoke.
TO GO
• “Lydia”
• The Ricketson Theatre
• Denver Center for the Performing
• Through March 1
• www.denvercenter.org | |
Don't waste your money and see Lydia
Written by reviewsan on 2008-02-01 07:41:52
I had a chance to see Lydia thinking I was going to support a Latino Director/Actors. This play goes against everything Latinos have been trying to overcome with the prejudice public. In one movie this director portrays Latinos as wife/child beaters, drug addicts, anti-Catholic, illegal, alcoholics, infidels and worst the ending portrays a brother and sister engaging in incest. I am offended as a Latino. This director brings our race down. People who go see this who have bias opinions about our race may actually believe we are all this way. Latinos don't waste your money! Worst, he dedicates this to his mother. How weird and sad... |
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