Press
Mother Road Reviews
https://mailtribune.com/news/top-stories/review-mother-road-a-powerful-journey
https://northbaystageandscreen.com/2019/03/24/review-osfs-mother-road/
https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/09/octavio-soliss-journey-to-mother-road/
Quixote Nuevo Reviews
Review: Don Quixote rides anew (on a bicycle!) in Cal Shakes world premiere
Pixar’s new film “Coco” opened last November to great acclaim in cinemas across the world. Octavio served as one of three cultural consultants on the project, along with Marcela Davison Aviles and Lalo Alcaraz. He also voiced the Arrivals Agent, one of the minor characters in the film.
Se Llama Cristina
“Octavio writes about what’s larger than life. He always has, and that’s great. That’s what I want to see in theater, and I think it’s what audiences want to see.” Director Loretta Greco – Chad Jones, SF Gate
“It’s a great homecoming for Octavio at the theatre where he first forged his career,” said producing artistic director Loretta Greco. “Se Llama Cristina is a very personal play for both Octavio and me. Its legacy harkens back to perhaps both Ionesco and Shepard, but it’s purely Octavio in its skewed humor and humanity, as a young man and woman struggle to transcend their past and their fate.” – Monica Turner, Stark Insider
Cloudlands
“Cloudlands” transcends cultural concerns in favor of universal verities. The result is nothing short of a triumph for all concerned with this extraordinary new work. – F Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times
Solis… loves to do the unexpected. In a career that has spanned more than two decades, the San Francisco-based writer has blended the visceral and the magical, the emotional and the intellectual in plays about Latinos — and not about Latinos — that have been produced around the country. – Karen Wada, LA Times
Don Quixote
Solis’ script deftly juggles the mundane and the fantastical… the sad truth of Don Quixote’s failures and accidental misdeeds, the hoax played upon him to stop his wanderings, the story’s equal-opportunity mocking of idealism and conventionality. – Marty Hughley, The Oregonian
“Octavio Solis strikes a beautiful balance in writing from his head and his heart,” says Bill Rauch, Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director, who has commissioned Solis to write an adaptation of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” “His work is smart and passionate.”
Lydia
Solis, like Arthur Miller, has an extraordinary ability to look with compassion into the hearts of his ordinary, flawed characters. But his storytelling, so rich in imagery, is uniquely infused with poetry, sexual desire, childlike wonder and violence at once. – John Moore, Denver Post
…an astonishing, expertly crafted tragedy that seduces and repels you at once. It tempts you with its pulsing rhythms and evocative language until it has you fully under its spell… – John Moore, Denver Post
“fresh, penetrating, often blissful…” – Anita Gates, New York Times
Octavio Solis fearlessly — exuberantly — plunges theater audiences into the sacred and profane by way of the Texas-Mexico border. – Neda Ulaby, NPR
“It’s a domestic drama, but the language and the theatrical idiom are anything but domestic — the way the combination of Spanish and English in the play is both comforting and jarring; the shifts in tone and mode are exhilarating, and the mysteries of the story stay with you long after you’ve read or seen it,” says James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. “It’s one of the most important plays of this decade.”
Santos & Santos
“Playwright/director Octavio Solís strips “truths” down to where they are no more than beliefs born of the character who holds them, which makes betrayal the one constant. Solís’ drama, intensity and complexity hearken back to the likes of Arthur Miller—no character gets off lightly, and yet every one is, in some way, sympathetic.” – Marianne Messina, Metroactive Stage
El Paso Blue
El Paso Blue is a Tex-Mex, po-mo, tragi-comic revenge musical, a knockout of a show… – Toby Zinman, Philadelphia Citypaper
There is mythic resonance in the father-son battle and in the father-daughter loss and the horrific conclusion manages to suggest simultaneously both the full force of ancient passion (Oedipus really has the blues) and absolutely contemporary disaffection (watch the photo motif). – Toby Zinman, Philadelphia Citypaper
“ambitious and stylistically nervy” – Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle
“a concentrated, continually inventive, darkly comic delight…” – Rpbert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner
“an exciting melodramatic thriller with mythic-poetic overtones…” – Matthew Surrence, The Oakland Tribune
Gibraltar
Playwright Octavio Solis earns its every conceivable nuance, and overcomes any allusion-driven doubts, with the emotional depth, sensual poetry, flesh-and- blood characters and gracefully intricate structure of “Gibraltar”… – Rob Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
Written with soul-searching honesty and breathtaking mastery… – Rob Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
El Otro
“Octavio Solis’ “El Otro” twists magical realism into a fierce and frighteningly funny fever dream.” – Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
Prospect
“A thoroughly fascinating, funny, scary, penetrating and gently uplifting dark-night-of-the-soul…” – Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner
“It’s a beautiful play, anarchic and careful…” – Dennis Harvey, San Francisco Bay Guardian
The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy
“The Ballad, is nothing if not hilarious. In fact, it’s super hilarious. It is full of richly drawn, comic singularities. Not unlike The Simpsons what you’ve got here is a gang of superior actors –thicker than thieves, locked in mutual admiration — tackling several roles each to render a wild collection of the most familiar characters you’ve never met. Take, for example, the appearance of suicidal, lovelorn cop/ventriloquist Orville Spudman and his potty-mouthed cop/dummy, Tiny Smalls. Performed by the stellar Danny Wolohan, the pair is a hundred times funnier than they sound. ” – Scott Sherwin, CurtainUp
