Synopsis:

Review
How can love be so wrong? a young widow cries out in Octavio Solis' GIBRALTAR. The question reverberates throughout Solis' lyrically dense, passionate and probing drama.... As separate but intriguingly interlinked stories unfold, and their narrators battle over their details, Solis turns one woman's numbing depression into a dynamic wrestle with the fundamentals of love and life.

It's one of the most compelling and impressive creations by one of San Francisco's leading playwrights since his landmark SANTOS & SANTOS....
...the intimacy of Solis' exploration of the dark, impulsive, complicated, threatening and tentatively redemptive shades of his repeated Gertrude Stein-like phrase, `Love is love is love .
The story takes place in San Francisco, with the Texas-born Solis turning from his frequent focus on culture-clash issues along the border (SANTOS, EL PASO BLUE) to similarly fraught clashes within the heart....
Solis develops his drama as a battle between the storytellers, with Palo and Amy locked in an evolving conflict of orgasmic intensity played for life-and-death and living death stakes. Martinez and Moreno embody the metaphorical struggle with passionate immediacy, pitting his charismatic, feral edge against her vital but vulnerable life force. The outcome isn't so much a victory for either as a renewed commitment to continuing the effort. Rather like love. Or life.

--Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

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Author Comment:

First produced by The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, in 2005.

Topics/Categories:

Depression, Love

Genre:

Psychology, Theater

Type of Work:

Play

Original Publish Date:

January 1, 2009

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