Award-winning playwright Octavio Solis and director Chi-wang Yang discuss their new collaboration, and Solis’s celebrated body of work rooted in Mexican American culture and community.
Playwright Octavio Solis and CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP) Associate Artistic Director Chi-wang Yang sit down together during rehearsals for their latest project, Scene with Cranes, a new play commissioned and produced by CNP. Their conversation recounts Solis’s early days in writing workshops with María Irene Fornés and staging plays in bars in the late 80s, and explores their creative process, touching upon the music of Jean Sibelius and the unarticulated grief of our nation.
Hosted by Marissa Chibás, this podcast was produced by CalArts Center for New Performance, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, Travis Preston Artistic Director and Dean of CalArts School of Theater. Produced by George Lugg and Rory James Leech. Editing and sound engineering by Duncan Woodbury. Podcast theme music by Cristian Amigo. Special thanks to Ravi Rajan, President of CalArts.
For more information on these artists and their work, as well as other CNP projects visit centerfornewperformance.org.
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OCTAVIO SOLIS with CHI-WANG YANG Podcast Transcript
Octavio Solis:
I like being in a state of surprise every time I put down a piece of text, a line of dialogue. I like and enjoy and savor what my characters do, it makes me feel like: What are you going to do next? It makes me feel delighted, delighted to discover what the next line is going to be, and that's the kind of place I want to be in. Even if the play is dark, there's always surprises.
(intro music)
Marissa Chibas (host):
Welcome to Cal Arts Center for New Performance: where we follow the artist. Our podcast is a place where visionary artists lead us into creative dialogue and discuss generous acts of world making. I'm your host, Marissa Chibas, speaking to you from our home at California Institute of the Arts, where for almost 5 decades a community of artists has come together to break ground and break bread while pushing the limits of artistic practice. Today we join a conversation between prominent American playwright Octavio Solis and Chi-wang Yang, associate artistic director of CNP, and an acting professor in the School of Theater. The two sat down together, taking a break during workshop rehearsals for their current collaboration: Scene with Cranes, a new play commissioned and produced by CNP. Octavio Solis writes plays that are rooted in Mexican American culture and community, told in richly poetic language, hat has earned him the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, A United States Artist Fellowship and the Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater award from the William Inge Center for the Arts, among many other accolades. As they discuss their creative process for Scene with Cranes, their conversation touches upon the music of Jean Sibelius and the unarticulated grief of our nation, as well as Octavio’s early days in writing workshops with Maria Irene Fornes, staging plays in bars in the late 80s, falling for San Francisco, and why he sharpens his pencils before sitting down at his computer to write.
(intro music)
Octavio Solis:
All right?
Chi-wang Yang:
I've never actually recorded a podcast before, so I'm like. OK, this is interesting. Octavio, thank you so much for being here and doing for doing this.
Octavio Solis:
It’s my pleasure, Chi-Wang. It's really my pleasure.
Chi-wang Yang:
This is just to let the listeners know today we just wrapped up a three-week workshop working on your new play Scene with Cranes, here at Cal Arts and the Center for New Performance or C&P as we call it. And I was thinking back this process has been a pretty long journey so far, but this started -
Octavio Solis:
Two years ago.
Chi-wang Yang:
Two years ago.
Octavio Solis:
And the year before that, when I first got the commission, This all started with Marissa Chibás. She wanted to commission me to write something for Duende Arts here at CalArts, and I'd always had this idea to write this piece that was based on a piece of music that I had been haunted by for so long. The piece was called Scene with Cranes. It was written by Jean Sibelius near the turn of the turn of the 19th Century, that is, and it had originally been written for another play, written by his brother-in-law. The play was called Death. I learned that Sibelius withdrew those pieces once the play closed. It didn't run for very long and he reformed them and joined two of them together to make Scene with Cranes, and that became an opus of his own. It's a seven minute piece of music, but every time I play it, I'm transported and I see these, like, snapshot images that are very different from the cranes that are evoked in the music, so I thought I should write that play, and I did. When I wrote it, submitted it, they asked if I wanted to come and do a workshop. I said, "Yes, but rather than work with the director, let me do the first workshop so I could work out some things in the writing by working directly with the students," and they gave me that two week period. It was really productive. I went home and I rewrote the work some more and we were going to workshop it again and produce it with you, Chi-wang, at the helm, but the pandemic hit, and so everything went on hold for almost two years, but here it is. The pandemic is still with us but somehow, we are opening up the doors again and finding ways to continue developing and producing theater.
Chi-wang:
We're coming hot off of this workshop, and personally, for me, I'm still kind of letting the ideas settle in my brain, but I'd love to hear you talk about what this workshopping process has been like and, as director, it's been a real gift for me, because when I was invited to do this through CNP, one of the values of CNP is to step outside of maybe some of the constraints of a really kind of aggressive, results-oriented rehearsal process, and to actually give space to the artists, and it's one of the kind of central tenets of what we do here at CNP, which is not only to center the artist, but the way that we like to talk about is to follow the artist, and as a director, that was a real gift, to have time to not just go right into, kind of, the pressure cook of making a show that's going to open in a few weeks, and to really have a process with the actors, and of course, with you, so I'd love to hear, just for you as a writer, how was it jumping into this room, working with these actors with this new script?
Octavio:
Well, Chi-wang, primarily, I consider myself a language writer. I hear the play. I hear the scenes. I hear the characters before I see them, and hearing their voices gives me an image of them, but I hear their cadences, I hear the rhythm of the play. It's almost like I'm listening to a radio play when I'm writing, and when I'm typing the text down, I'm often saying the lines of the characters, so for me, I receive the play orally. To me, there's an oral kind of expectation of how the play sounds, and I have not traditionally concerned myself with the physical, with the space, with the shape and silhouettes of the characters, the textures, until much later. In this case, I had the play, but we came, instead of to workshop the play itself, instead we workshopped the situation of the play, the conditions in which these people are living, and that was different, because that meant, then, that you were free to explore what is a character's chief gesture, how do they move, how do they respond to tragedy, how do they respond to joy, what makes them happy, and who are they threatened by, who do they connect to in the room, and seeing all that played out really made me happy, because then I was really inspired by watching that and comparing it to my text and seeing how what I was seeing up there could affect some kind of change on the text, because this text is different.
Chi-wang:
One of the thing that first struck me when I read the script was that the world is so much a world in transition and in transformation, and that it starts in an very intimate kind of place of transformation, transformation between the relationship of a mother to her daughter, a son to his parents, and then it starts to expand out and it becomes, the story is also about a transformation of generations, and the powers, the histories, the traumas and the aspirations between the generations, and as it keeps growing, we're also seeing that it's even larger. It's a transformation happening amongst the community across the urban landscape, gentrification, and to me, it's not just such a distinctly American drama and tragedy, but there are definitely these echoes of the Greek tragedy in there, as well. Do you consider this an adaptation of any sort, or what's the role of, when you're kind of working, to adaptation or to source original material? Like, for example, it seems like the germ of this play came from the Sibelius piece, and so, how do you move from these original inspirations or sources and let them kind of evolve and grow?
Octavio:
Well, I have to find my engagement in it. I have to find, where do I fit in? How is this about me? So I was listening to Sibelius and seeing, in my head, a news report, a live TV feed of families in grief, Mexican women crying, held back by the yellow tape at night and the cameras glaring at them, because of someone's passing, a violent passing, and I said, "What do these have to do with each other?" Then, I started to sort of get more kinds of snapshots, postcard pictures from the play, and I started seeing the characters and I said, "All right. Well, this is a way in." It's only after I've written it that I feel like there's a little bit of Hecuba in Lourdes. There's something queenly about her, but a destroyed queen, a queen laid low, and something about her husband, Armeno, that evokes Priam for me, who was also laid low, killed, and they're both undergoing terrible suffering in this house because of the death of their boy, so there's a little bit of Hecuba in a little bit of Trojan women in this, in Lourdes, but I'm not reading Trojan Women. I'm listening only to Scene with Cranes.
Chi-wang:
Is there a quote, unquote, standard writing process for you, Octavio?
Octavio:
Oh, man, that varies. That varies. I like to sort of say, and I tell my students this, that I first have to be in a quiet, peaceful, relaxed state of mind, away from everything, away from the distractions, away from the internet, especially, and my phone, where I can focus and just get started. I have my work resistances that I deal with, like I have to sharpen all my pencils even though I'm probably typing. I have to empty the trash. I have to go to the bathroom. When I go to the bathroom, make sure I have a glass of water or my cup of coffee, or if I'm working at night, my glass of bourbon, and then, maybe send a few quick emails and then get started. It's so hard to just kind of come in, sit down, focus and start. I have this routine. I call them work resistances, because they are. They're things that kind of get in the way, but I'm getting there. My head is getting there. It's like clearing your desk before you get started. Those are some of the things, and then, I go to a place in my head where I see these people in a real place, and either I've been seeing them already and they've been calling for me for several months to, come on, write this play, and so I see them already and I don't have to go very far to imagine exactly where they are, and then I start writing. I do not read what I've written until I'm done with that day's writing. I don't go back and read anything until I'm done. Then, I'll go back and go, oh, okay, and usually the first couple of paragraphs or the first scene, the first lines, are terrible, but I go, it's okay. I'll go back and fix them later. That's the editing and that comes much later, so that's kind of how I get started.
Chi-wang:
Yeah. In a previous talk with some of our students, you were talking about in your process how you don't really strategically outline, or that your process is not formulaic in how you build out a script. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Octavio:
Yeah. It's really hard to make characters out of a formula, because then they start serving the needs of the outline rather than the needs of their character, their own personal needs. It's very important that my characters all have agency, that they have an opinion about what they say and a way to do it, and that they're not obligated to me, the writer, in any way. They have to act out of their own needs, and that keeps it forward, but sometimes they'll talk in circles. They'll talk in circles for like three, four, five pages, and then they'll go, okay. Someone's got to bang their head through the wall before we hit step B, because they're all saying the same thing over and over, and they're in a rut, and that's okay, too, because that's part of the writing process, trying to figure out, okay, I'm writing but spinning my wheels. How do I get out of this? Giving the characters agency means that you think of them as real people, and you think of where they are as a real place, and I ask my students when they're writing, don't set this on a stage. Don't say stage left is a doorway, stage right is this, the audience is over here. Don't go there at all. If it's a house, see a real house. See all four walls or five walls. Walk upstairs. Go into the attic. You didn't know there was an attic? There's an attic, and maybe there's a basement. What's in the basement? Maybe you'll find some things that are going to be important in the play, but really, really see this as a place with its own integrity, a real place with real sunlight coming in, and people coming who are real to themselves. They can't see you. They don't know you're there at all, but they're real to each other, because if you do it the other way, then, really, your play is taking place on a set and your characters are actors, and the thing about actors is they know it's a play, and they are aware that there's an audience listening and watching, and if they are aware of that, they're not going to be themselves. They're going to modify their behavior, they're going to censor themselves and they're going to be good people instead of who they are, so I always say don't set it on a stage. I don't want to see anyone in that scene except the people that are there, and then watch how the world opens up. Watch. I like being in a state of surprise every time I put down a line of dialogue. I like and enjoy and savor what my characters do. It makes me feel like, what are you going to do next? It makes me feel delighted, delighted to discover what the next line's going to be, and that's the kind of place I want to be in. Even if the play's dark, there's always surprises, and sometimes surprises can happen scene by scene. I'll write one version of the scene. After a while, it doesn't seem like the right scene, so I'll say, let me introduce those characters to each other again. Let me see what new scene they can show me. If I just really, truly let them go, how will they act this time, and they'll surprise me.
Chi-wang:
One of the real pleasures has been having you in the rehearsal room and just being kind of a little bit of a fly on the wall of your writing process, and something that I've really admired is the collaborative spirit you bring to the work, and as you were talking about your process, it just made me think that, yeah, I see you collaborating with the characters, and when we've been in a little bit of this revision process, I really noticed that you wouldn't really come into the room saying, "This is what I want to have happen in the play." You really come in thinking about, what's been happening in their life? What would lead them to this thing, so it really feels like there's not only this beautiful company of eight actors in the room but there's this whole other company of eight characters that you're collaborating with in real time.
Octavio:
Oh, yeah. It's nice to sort of see them in 3D instead of only in my head or on a page. It's nice sort of seeing them and feeling like, okay, now I know what that character looks like. I see how that character walks. I see how that character regards the other one. I see how she reacts. Now, how can the text accommodate that? A play is a very pliable, porous thing. It has to be, or else it's dead, so it has to operate a little like a sponge and like something alive in the water. It has to be able to absorb all the artistic ideas from designers, producers, actors, dramaturgs, directors, and maybe even other writers. It has to be able to absorb that, and what it can't absorb, it'll jettison, but it should be porous enough to assume that and still maintain its integrity, still maintain its shape. At the same time, though, it has to be pliable. It has to be able to mold and shape itself to the needs of the company, and especially when the play is still finding itself. Then, I go, okay, okay. I know something I can go. They just showed me a direction I could go that I didn't know was there. They just opened a new door in the house to a room I didn't know was there. Let's see what happens when we go there.
Chi-wang:
Are you someone who feels like your work comes from a necessity? That this work is necessary right now?
Octavio:
Well, it's all necessary. I've written things that I feel are whimsy and I do for myself or to have fun, but this pandemic has made art really necessary, and I think this play reflects, I think, the really unacknowledged grief that I think the world is undergoing. It just hasn't really stopped to take it in how many people have died in the world because of COVID, how our world has changed because of COVID, how it's changed the way we function with each other. I don't know that we're grieving. We're angry. Nobody wants to wear these masks, but it's necessary. Right now it's necessary, but I don't want to wear it. Nobody wants to wear it, but we have to, and that's part of the thing that I think we feel angry about, but the grief, I don't think it's really acknowledged yet, not on a global sense. I know there is mourning happening for a lot of people who have lost loved ones and who've lost their livelihood, who've lost businesses and lost their theater, but I think that it's still sort of still just below the surface, and I think it's going to come up, and I think this play reflects that. I didn't feel like a comedy was coming from me, and that might be the next great movement, the next place we go to in our writing for the theater, but I'm in a place where I am still dealing with death and the impending death, because I had COVID and it was bad, and I scared my wife. I scared myself. I was really sick, and since then I've had several friends who have committed suicide.
I've had friends who are dealing with illness, like cancer, and it's been very hard to sort of observe all these things, and I'm channeling a lot of that into this work, and I still don't have it worded yet right, like what grief is and what grief does, and so I'm going to be constantly searching for that, for the right words. Maybe it isn't even words. Maybe it's something else, but I think we're all dealing with a place, quietly dealing with our mourning. But loss is loss and before the world can change, they have to deal with the loss and they have to ask those questions like who and why. Why? I think that's sort of where we're at right now. We're digging into that place where we're asking why, why, and even bigger questions like why is art necessary? We sure needed it, man.
Chi-wang:
something I wanted to ask you about was, just to kind of go back into your history as a writer, is that, is it correct that you first started writing when you were in Dallas?
Octavio:
I really sort of decided I was a playwright, finally, in Dallas. I had been a student at Dallas Theater Center where they had the graduate program for Trinity University, and after three years there I graduated and I was free, but I wasn't ready to move to New York to go pound the sidewalk, so to speak, so I needed jobs and I got a bartending job, two nights a week, and then I got a teaching job at the Arts Magnet High School at Booker T. Washington, one of the first magnet schools in the country, and I taught playwriting. They wanted me to be a playwriting teacher, and I told the principal, "I'm an actor." He says, "Well, you come highly recommended by your playwriting teacher," and I went, "Oh, okay," so I decided to take the job. It was four hours a day, and then at night I could do my theater thing. Well, I started finding out that these students were really good. They started producing real plays. They were playing hooky from other classes to come and write in my room and hang out and write after school. Something was happening that was good, and it was because of me, and I said, "Maybe I'm a writer, too." I started writing plays to kind of cast myself because I found a job at another bar called The 500 Café which is kind of a new wave bar, and I saw that Wednesday nights, the stage was empty. There was nobody there and I asked my boss, "Hey, can I have that?" He said, "Sure, but I'm not paying for it. I'm not paying everybody." "That's okay. I'll pay them." I started a poetry reading series, and I knew poets, good poets that had chapbooks or were published. I set up a table where they could bring their books and we could sell them. My manager did say they could have an open bar, and a lot of them said, "We'll do it just for that," but I paid them out of my pocket, 20 bucks, you know. 20 bucks to read for half an hour, and then another poet would read in the next half hour or 40 minutes, and then I started saying, "Well, maybe we can have a performer, guitarist come and play in between the two poets." I paid him, too, and then I started thinking, “maybe I should write some plays for the next Wednesday”, because it would only happen on Wednesdays, it was called Words on Wednesday, so I started writing these funky verse plays, because it was poetry, so I said, "I have to write poetry and songs and all that," and we had so much fun.
Chi-wang:
I love that this started at not the formal theater space, but at the bar.
Octavio:
At the bar.
Chi-wang:
Yeah. What was the vibe like of these early shows?
Octavio:
Well, I knew my audience. They were artistes from the area, and painters, and club people, and the occasional real drunk, but often young, because they were attracted to it because of the bands that played, so they started coming. They started coming in droves. The first time I did it, Words on Wednesdays, I had, like, 10 people. By the time I did my play, which was six weeks later, and it was only on for one night, it was full, like 60, 70 people, standing room only. Eventually, we had to move them outside, but I started doing a saga. I did 10 plays and I called it the Geometricia Saga, and it was a blast writing for them, and it was really intended to showcase my acting. I played a character named Rigor Morgan.
Chi-wang:
Rigor Morgan?
Octavio:
Yes, and I was not a symbol for death. I said, "I'm a symbol for microwave ovens," whatever that means, and I had my trusty assistant. Her name was Corpus Christi, and we were real hipsters, but the main character was Geometricia, and the play was always about her adventures and I'd write a new one every six weeks and then we'd rehearse it three, four days, and then we'd put it on, off book. I'd stage it very quickly, because it's a small stage for, like, a band, and we went around the tables where the people were drinking. Some people said, "Hey, can you write me a scene?" She was a dancer, so I said, "Oh, I'll write a ballerina segment where a ballerina just comes on and does a dance," and these guys said, "Hey, can we compose or write music for you?" I said, "Yeah," and so they started getting involved after the first one, and they became the house band for the thing, and I collaborated with them on writing songs and they were superb. They also provided us with the rehearsal space at the warehouse they were squatting at, and it was a magical time. I didn't know anything about playwriting, really. I was making all kinds of mistakes, beautiful mistakes, because I didn't know what I was doing, and that was so freeing. Now I know all these rules and things about what's allowed and what's not. I wish I was that innocent again, because the plays had a kind of special quality to them that the community loved, and so many people saw them. Every sixth Wednesday there was a new one. I did 10 of them, but I'll never share them with anyone because I look at them now and I go, these are from the mind of a 21 year old kid. I was older, but they feel so young and naïve, but still so sunny and full of spirit, full of spunk, and they're precious to me, very precious documents to me, but I'll never let them be staged. But that launched my playwriting career.
Chi-wang:
When was your first commission as a playwright?
Octavio:
My first commission as a playwright was also my first play about my culture, my first Latino play, and it happened shortly after those plays. I would say it happened around '88, 1988. Cora Cardona, was the artistic director of her company Teatro Dallas, and she said, "Write us a play. Write us a play." I said, "Okay. Good. How much?" She said, "You come up with a figure." I said, "$1,00?" She and the person who works at parks and rec, because the play was in a building at a park. They looked at each other and then they looked at me and said, "We can do that." I didn't know I was really low-balling myself. They said, "$1,000. We can do that," so I thought, “wow. $1,000 to write a play”. In 1988, that went a long way for me. They did put some rules down. Here's the other thing that was amazing about Teater Dallas. I didn't know there were other Latino actors. I didn't know there Latino plays. I didn't know there were directors who could direct plays about my culture. I didn't know that existed until then. I didn't know about Luis Valdez. It was a big hole in my education, but then she said, "Write something about your own culture." I said, "Okay." "It has to be about Day of the Dead and it has to have Don Juan. In other words, write me a Don Juan play. Set it during Day of the Dead." I went, "Oh, dear. Okay. Okay." I didn't know anything about Don Juan, anything, except Latin lover, whatever, so I did some research. I read all these works, El burlador de Sevilla, the Trickster Seville, was the very first one. There's Don Juan Tenorio that was written in Mexico, the next big one. Mozart had a crack at it, Don Giovanni is Don Juan. Man and Superman is a Don Juan play. John Tanner is Juan Tenorio. Even Moliner did one - I think it's called the Stone Guest or Stone Feast or something like that. Anyway, I read all these works and they were wonderful but I said, "They're missing something. Especially if I'm going to bring in Day of the Dead, I got to have, kind of, almost a comedia spirit to this, so I had just studied comedia and I knew about the father who was always blustery and watching out for his daughter. The daughter's cute and pretty and innocent. There's a trickster, who is Don Juan, and then there's his henchman or his best friend, Fracas, who is the narrator of the story and it worked. The play worked, and I did it, and they produced it and I was really happy with it. SER got wind of it and they produced it at their reading series, and at the end of the reading they said, "We're going to do it. We'll produce it," and they did the following year. That was 1990.
Chi-wang:
Could you talk about what that meant for you, to have that kind of realization that there Latino theaters, that there were Latino actors and communities and Chicano actors and theaters that you could write for and write with.
Octavio:
I think it made me realize who I was. I think, prior to that, I thought I was white. I think, prior to that, I was trying to fit into a very white world, and when I saw someone else, it was like looking in a mirror. Some other Latino was an actor. I wanted to do my plays, I realized. “I know who I am now”, so I haven't looked back. All my plays are written for Latino companies and Latino actors and have a Latino aesthetic that is unique to me, but also, there are things that are shared with other Latinos, especially the Mexican-American Latinos, that we all kind of share in common. We're all so very different, but there's similarities, but seeing that, seeing them, seeing this company, made me realize who I really was and what a sham I was before. Try as I was, I just said, they will never let me fit in, and I didn't have to fit in. Once I accepted myself, once I put on and realized the skin that is me, then the other theaters wanted me for that. They wanted me more. They didn't want me because I wrote white plays for white actors. They wanted me because I wrote plays about my culture, because of who I was, and that was a revelation. That was a real revelation for me, so I'm grateful for those companies that opened their doors to me, big, large houses that have let me in and invited me and let me make a home there. I think of the Magic Theatre. I think of South Coast Repertory. I think of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I think of Denver Center. These are places that have opened up their home, and then there's other places that were always home, like INTAR and, in San Francisco, the now completely altered Intersection for the Arts.
Chi-wang:
I wanted to hear about that. What was it like when you moved to San Francisco and how did you meet the folks at Intersection for the Arts?
Octavio:
Well, one of my best friends moved there. He and his wife moved there, and she's an actor who was in the same program that I was in in Dallas. They moved to San Francisco, and while I was still in Dallas, they coaxed me. “Come visit. You'll love it here. Come, come”, so I scrounged my money and saved up and bought a ticket. Then, I met my future wife as a girlfriend. We started dating, and I said, "I have to go on this trip," and they said, "It's okay. It's okay," so I went and flew and stayed with them and had a blast. Saw some wild-ass theater. There was a group called Dude Theater and they would drink, like, two six packs each before they said “REHEARSAL!”, and they were doing some wild theater, but there was incredible theater going on everywhere. I was there for a week, I think, having a great time, and when I came back I told my wife, "Baby, baby, don't get hooked on me because I'm moving to San Francisco," and she said, "When do we go?" I went, "Oh, great. That's exactly what I wanted to hear," and so we moved in late '89, early 1990, and as soon as I arrived, my friends had told the people at Dude Theater about me. I had already known some of them, and one of the people from Dude Theater was the theater director at Intersection for the Arts, and he said, "Hey, I understand you're in town. Write me a play." I said, "Okay." "It goes up in six months." "What?" I was like, "I haven't even written it yet." He says, "Yeah, it goes up in six months." "Oh, okay," and then at the same time, the Magic Theatre called, Jeannie Chan called me from there. She was the literary manager working for John Lion and she said, "John really likes your work. I really love your work. Can we do Men of the Flesh?" I said, "Sure," so within eight months I had two plays running simultaneously in San Francisco, so I said, "Yes. This is home. I'm here," but I really felt more at home at Intersection because they were ready to do anything I wrote, anything. They were so hungry, and then they had an in house company called Campo Santos and they really launched their company with a production of my play Santos and Santos, and it's from that launching of that play that they said, "That's from our company," so it kind of became their original production. I think I wrote five, six plays for them six. I was working in this little garage theater with almost no budget at all and we were making incredible magic at the same time that I was working in the large theater world. I liked the idea of being comfortable in storefront theaters and also in these big houses where they could do my plays big with huge budgets, 500 seat houses. Clearly, I was comfortable in that, and it's also because I have a big telescope that I work with. I work on a big canvas, and I'm surprised that even at Intersection, this teeny space, that those big canvas stories work just as well, sometimes better. Better.
Chi-wang:
Why?
Octavio:
Because it makes the audience work. Especially in a play that's going to be shifting from one scene to another scene and be episodic in that way, you can't have too much of a big set. You have to have the very, single one thing that says, "This is an office and that's a house," and a single thing that says, "That's a parking lot and this is the desert," and sometimes it's just lighting. It's just light, and that audience is so well trained at Intersection that they were like, "Okay. Now I'm here. All right. I'm not lost. I'm here. I'm not lost. Okay." They could turn, pivot from scene to scene and never be confused, never get lost, and that was really kind of special that they could do that there.
Chi-wang:
Yeah. It almost seems like there's a kind of heightened imagination and vulnerability in that kind of smaller space where you're not really tricking anybody. It's really happening through a shared, kind of imagination, a shared willingness to be there in that moment.
Octavio:
Yeah.
Chi-wang:
You studied playwriting with María Irene Fornés, right?
Octavio:
I did. I studied with her at Intar when she had the Hispanic playwrights project - Playwrights Lab, I think that's what it's called. The Lab, we all called it that, and we'd meet there every morning, like, at 9:00, and we would do warmups. She had a huge room to work with with the tables, long white tables, already in a circle to accommodate her and maybe 8 more people, maybe 10 at the most, and that was already set up on one side, this other area next to it that had huge rugs, Persian rugs set out, and she led us through warmups. We did stretches and warmups and lying down and holding like this for a long time and like this, holding our ... I'm sorry. I'm talking as if they can see. We'd be doing stretches and lying down and breathing exercises, and sometimes I could hear snoring. Somebody would be falling asleep, and she never complained about that. In fact, she said that it's actually encouraged, because it means, if you're yawning while you're working, it means you're in that dream state. You're in that space between dreaming and waking, where you're available for things to happen. You're not super alert and ready and on the balls of your feet, but neither are you completely on your heels. You're somewhere in that liminal space already, so she would lead us for almost half an hour with exercises like that, and then we'd be at the table and then we would start our visualization exercises, where she would ask us to close our eyes and then take us through a journey, and then we'd see something and then she'd say, "Begin writing," and we'd write for an hour, maybe, an hour, and then we'd take a break and then we'd come and we'd share what we read. Every day it was like that. It was a routine, just like that. There was no expectation. You didn't have to write a play. In the end, I think we did. I did. My play was terrible, but it's all right, because I learned how to apply the pedagogy that she used to me, in a very specific way, and I think that's what I needed. She asked me if I wanted to come the next year and do it again. Just, she was going to offer it, I think, for free, and I said, "I think I'm going to pass," and she seemed really surprised and taken aback. "You didn't like this?" I said, "I loved it. I loved it. Don't get me wrong. I loved these exercises. I've learned so much from you, but now I have to go home and apply that. My wife is waiting for me at home. I have to go home and work on that and work in the world, but I will take your lessons with me," and she said, "Okay," and we became really good friends. We chat on the phone. When she came to San Francisco, she'd visit, if she had a reading or something. I would drive her around, take her out. One of the last times I saw her was at a TCG conference in Seattle, but the really last time I saw her was when I said goodbye to her when she was in her waning years dealing with Alzheimer's, and it was very moving to come in and just sit down with her. She had her eyes closed but she seemed to hear me, and I just laid my hand on hers and held her for a while, and then I took a picture of her hand. I didn't want to take a picture of her. I thought that would be disrespectful, but of her hands, because her hands were really special, and that's it, and I kept that to myself. I went there when I knew she would be available and that was my own personal quiet visit with Irene. A lot of people had done that pilgrimage, had come from all over the country to visit her because she really connected to them deeply and we were all acolytes of her. Still, I feel like an acolyte of her.
Chi-wang:
Has that time influenced you now as a teacher yourself?
Octavio:
Yes. Absolutely. The exercises I do are influenced by her pedagogy. I think it's important, like she thought, to be relaxed, to have meditation, to almost hypnotize yourself so that you can then visualize, and then wait, wait, wait, till you see something, till you see it, till you hear voices, and then when you hear, write them, so it's documentation after that, and you're not working so hard. I'm not inventing anything. I'm not creating dialogue out of the blue. They're talking, and it's great. It's liberating, and that was her gift to me, I think, her real gift. She made me trust my view of the world, which is more surreal, my view of humanity. She made me trust that
Chi-wang:
It has been such a pleasure working with you and having this conversation with you, and before we break, tell us a little bit about what's on the horizon for you. You also recently published Retablos.
Octavio:
Yes. I have a book called Retablos that came out in 2018, so it's been 3 years now, and it's still selling. It's selling very well. I'd like to write another book. I have an idea for a novel that I'd like to do, but I can't get started on it until I take care of all my theater obligations, of which Scene with Cranes is one. I have commissions also with San Francisco Playhouse, with the Arena Stage, with, oh dear, La Jolla Playhouse. I've got a number of commissions waiting for me, and I need to get cracking on them, and I have, also, an individual commercial project I'm working on, a musical that I'm writing with the young men composers of Los Globos with Louis Pérez and David Hidalgo, with Tony Taccone at the helm as director and Brett Garfield as our chief producer, so that's on the horizon.
I've started writing a little bit of that. I've had two plays open recently, two productions, Quixote Nuevo at the Round House in Bethesda and what's currently running at the San Diego Rep is Mother Road, and they did really well, and I'm just really proud of them.
Chi-Wang
Well, thank you so much, and I'm so excited to see even more of your work in the coming years and thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Octavio:
Thank you for having me on this podcast because you've been so gracious, such a gracious director and a gracious friend to me and to the actors, and I'm very proud to be part of this.
Chi-wang:
Beautiful. Beautiful. All right. Okay, well, let's leave it there. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Octavio:
Thank you, Chi-wang. I appreciate it.
(outro music)
Marissa Chibas (host):
That was Octavio Solis and Chi-wang Yang in conversation during rehearsals for the Cal Arts Center for New Performance production of Scene with Cranes, scheduled to premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles in Fall of 2022. This podcast was produced by Cal Arts Center for New Performance, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, Travis Preston, Artistic Director and Dean of CalArts School of Theater. Produced by George Lugg and Rory James Leech. Editing and Sound Engineering by Duncan Woodbury. Podcast theme music by Christian Amigo. Special thanks to Ravi Rajan, President of CalArts. For more information on this and other CNP podcasts, visit centerfornewperformance.org. You can find more episodes and subscribe for upcoming ones at centerfornewperformance.org/podcast or find us on your favorite source for podcasts, including iTunes and Spotify.
Thank you for listening. Until next time.