‘El Otro’ by Octavio Solis @ Teatro Dallas
Photos by Javier Carmona
—Teresa Marrero
El Otro means “the Other” in Spanish. In both Spanish and English, the word implies duality: here or there, this one or the other one. It hangs consciousness on a wire. Falling to one side or the other has consequences. Remaining on the wire may be a feat few can manage.
And yet, Octavio Solis has been doing just that for most of his writing career. His plays are often set on the Texas border with Mexico, a place where hybrid identity often unfolds violently. The first play I reviewed in Dallas was in 2013, for the performing arts website TheaterJones. It was a Solis play entitled Se Llama Cristina (Her Name is Cristina). It had premiered in January 2013 at the Magik Theatre in San Antonio—and that May, Kitchen Dog Theater brought it to Dallas. El Otro is an older play, one that premiered in 1998 in San Francisco (and has had only two subsequent productions). It may be safe to say it is not one of Solis’ most popular works.
Why do I bring this up, when I have seen so many of his plays? There was Man of the Flesh (1990, South Coast Rep and then in 1998 in Teatro Dallas, under Cora Cardona); Santos y Santos (1995, Dallas Theater Center); Dreamlandia (2000, Dallas Theatre Center); Lydia (2015, Cara Mía Theatre Company); and Quijote Nuevo (2023, Denver Center for the Performing Arts).
Maybe it is because for me, this play, El Otro, was as challenging to digest as Se Llama Cristina. Let me see if I can untangle the knots of my thinking about the play and the production.
Alyssa Carrasco´s direction was spot on. It revealed the soul of a complicated plot that occurs not only on two sides of the border, but also straddling multiple realities. The triangular scenic design by Justin Locklear projected the action towards the audience, appropriately allowing the two projecting sides to suggest two geographic spaces. This demarcation also occurred through beautiful poetic language.
The cast did a fabulous job of embodying the difficult characters. The play rides upon the central figure of a character named Romy (Bethany Mejorado), the Observer who not only provides narration but is also the central figure in the struggle between two fathers. She breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience (or some imaginary entity only she sees) and referring to herself as La Romy. She then switches back and forth to being part of the action.
The two fathers involved are both present throughout most of the play. One is the very violent and abusive Lupe (Alex Camacho), husband of Romy’s unhappy mother Nina (Zarina Garza)—and the other is Romy’s new adoptive father, Ben (Eduardo Velez III), a Private First-Class officer in the U.S. Army. Ben is from Chicago, and everyone calls him Sergeant, since Ben wears his military greens throughout the play. While Lupe is hyper-macho, hyper-sexual, and over the top with his emotions and actions, Ben is seen as rather emasculated.
Notions of manhood entangled with machismo run throughout this play. Lupe and Anglo cowboy friend Ross (Brian Vigen, who also plays the Border Officer) are portrayed as wild and lawless cowboys. And there cannot be a Mexican play without some physical representation of La Muerte (Death), here embodied as El Charro—a Mexican cowboy (Rudy Lopez) dressed in Death’s traditional black.
And oh, did I mention that, just as in Se Llama…, the action in El Otro takes place in El Paso? In both plays, that city is portrayed as beyond redemption, a no man´s land from which the best that can happen is to get away from it. El Paso is Solis´ hometown, which he left years ago to pursue his career first in Dallas, then in Northern California. He now resides in Oregon. El Paso represents the archetype of a place to leave and never return.
The other male is Polo (Javier Carmona), who plays Alma´s (Dr. Marta M. Torres) husband. They are ranch owners and parents to one Anastasio, whose identity is a mystery until nearly the end. So as not to spoil the ending, we will leave this character alone, except to say that his remnants appear most unusually. He is also related to Romy, although she does not know this from the beginning.
The performance, which included singing original music, felt honest and deeply committed, though there is not one lovable character among them. I did not like Lupe, Ben, Nina, or Romy, for that matter. Each is damaged goods. Solis has a knack for writing deeply troubled souls (Lydia) in a way that pushes one´s buttons.
Back to the direction. I can only imagine the challenge that this play posed for Carrasco and Gabriel Scampini (Assistant Director). The characters seem to be one thing, then become something/someone else. The timelines cross and shift, interweaving the array of characters, spaces, and states of consciousness. Romy chews peyote at the beginning of the play, so we may assume that what we see is her hallucination…or not. In the playbill, Carrasco states that ¨Solis is a playwright who has always both transfixed and disoriented me. ¨ Truly, this El Otro disoriented me in ways that left me wondering what I had just seen. With all due respect to his wonderful talent, this is not one of Octavio´s most polished works.
I asked my Mexican and Chicana women companions what their opinion was as Mexicans, since this play anchors itself within that locus of identity. Our conversation ran in many directions, but the bottom line was that this story felt dated and the stereotypes too well trodden. Perhaps the border issue may remain timely, but when has it not been? After President Trump´s first term with its mass separations and deportations of unaccompanied Mexican children, surely there are more pressing and recent stories to tell that push past a 1990s vision of the border.
Teresa Marrero is Professor of Latin American and Latiné Theater at the University of North Texas.
WHEN: May 16-31, 2025
WHERE: Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak Street, Dallas
WEB: teatrodallas.org
