Photo from rehearsals for an Open Process event for The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, with Campo Santo founders and actors (left to right): Margo Hall and Luis Saguar (standing); Campo Santo member and actor Delia MacDougall; and Deborah Cullinan, Executive Director, Intersection for the Arts.
(Photo by the play’s set designer James Faerron)

Project Title:  The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy
Recipient Organization:  Campo Santo
Lead Artist:   Octavio Solis
Genre and Date Awarded:  Performing Arts, June 2002
To Be Presented: World Premiere in October, 2005; works-in-progress events beginning in summer 2003, next Open Process event March 14, 7:30pm.

Playwright and director Octavio Solis and ensemble Campo Santo are developing and premiering a play based on the true story of a young Latino couple who went on a robbery spree, holding up in San Francisco Mission District bars and clubs in the 1980s.  The project provides Solis and the members of Campo Santo with a rare opportunity to “start from scratch,” improvising and experimenting together over a two year period in developing characters, a story, and a sense of place.  Through extensive interviews with people who remember the couple and the hold-ups, exchanges of drawings and character sketches, Solis and Campo Santo are investigating, “the kinds of true-life stories that are rarely told and that reveal a great deal about the social, political, and cultural undertones of a city.”

The story revolves around a pair of unlikely crooks who conducted a series of audacious robberies.  Hitting only bars and nightclubs, referred to at the time as “a Latino version of Bonnie and Clyde,” the pair eluded capture for months.  Their story shapes the plot, but the play also addresses city life in the Mission District—gentrification and class politics in housing and employment.  The collaborators plan to give The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy an over-the-top stylization, adopting features of vaudeville and silent cinema to relate events.  The police team in hot pursuit of the felons will be portrayed by a policeman and his ventriloquist dummy partner, who is based on the famous San Franciscan officer Brendan O’Smarty.  Solis writes, “The work will be colorful, naughty, brash, physical, and filled to the brim with San Francisco lore.”

Octavio Solis’s work encompasses struggles of identity, border, and morality in the context of modern Latino American life, specifically that of Mexican Americans and Chicanos.  His stories often have an epic span, addressing ownership, home, and morality.  The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy’s San Francisco setting marks a new direction for Solis, a native Texan, whose work normally lives in the border between the United States and Mexico or in the deserts of the Southwest.  The project also offers an opportunity for the writer to develop the play with the company of actors who will be in the production.  As a director, Solis typically guides actors through the back history of characters and uses improvisation as part of the rehearsal process.  In this ensemble context, performers and playwright/director will discover and shape that process together.  He writes, “With this project I want to break out of the style I’ve set for myself and I am grateful that Campo Santo has welcomed me into a space that is about experimentation and collaboration.”

Campo Santo first came together while performing Santos & Santos by Octavio Solis in a Youth Correctional Facility in 1996.  Years later, performing primarily at Intersection for the Arts, they have achieved remarkable artistic and community success, producing 15 new works with writers Migdalia Cruz, Denis Johnson, Greg Sarris, Jose Rivera, Naomi Iizuka, Philip Kan Gotanda, and others.  Its name, “Campo Santo,” is Spanish for graveyard, sacred ground, or family of saints. Working from the roots of this emblem, their mission is “taking the sacred form of storytelling and using it as a tool to bond community through socially relevant plays; forming a family and passing down the flame to the next generation.”  Campo Santo has won many awards including the Will Glickman Award for Best New Play for Erin Cressida Wilson’s Trail of Her Inner Thigh, and the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best New Play for Denis Johnson’s Hellhound on My Trail.  The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy enables Campo Santo to collaborate with the writer whose play inspired the ensemble’s founding.

Core members of Campo Santo—Margo Hall, Michael Torres, Sean San Jose, and Luis Saguar— are participating in the creation of the piece along with long-time Campo Santo associates Catherine Castellanos, Donald Lacy, Delia MacDougall and Danny Wolohan.  The design team includes composer Beth Custer, stage manager Michael G. Cano, costume designer Suzanne Castillo, lighting designer Jim Cave and set designer James Faerron.

Octavio Solis is a playwright and director living in San Francisco.  His works, Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, La Posada Magica, and Dreamlandia have been mounted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Dallas Theater Center, Intersection for the Arts, Thick Description, The Magic Theater in San Francisco, South Coast Repertory, the San Diego Repertory, La Compania de Albuquerque, Teatro Vista in Chicago, El Teatro Campesino, and many other venues.  Solis has received a National Endowment for the Arts 1995-97 Playwriting Fellowship, the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center, the Will Glickman Playwright Award for Santos & Santos, a production grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays for Dreamlandia at the Dallas Theater Center, the 1998 TCG/NEA Theater Artists-in-Residence Grant, the 1998 McKnight Fellowship grant from the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, and the 2000-2001 National Theater Artists Residency Grant from TCG.  Solis is a member of the Dramatists Guild and New Dramatists.

Plays Produced

• Bethlehem
• With Campo Santo + Intersection, World Premiere July, 2003.
• Dreamlandia
• Shiner (with Erik Ehn)
• El Otro
• Santos & Santos
• Campo Santo Inaugural Production,  July, 1996.
• El Paso Blue
• Intersection for the Arts, World Premiere1994
• La Posada Magica
• Prospect
• Man of the Flesh

Performed at the following theaters (1989-2000):

• Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon
• South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California
• The Dallas Theater Center, Dallas, Texas
• Undermain Theatre, Dallas, Texas
• Imua Theatre Company, New York, New York
• Teatro Vision, San Jose, California
• Campo Santo, San Francisco, California
• Teatro Vista, Chicago, Illinois
• Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Miracle Theatre, Portland, Oregon
• The Venture Theatre, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• The San Diego Repertory, San Digeo, California
• Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, California
• San Jose Repertory, San Jose, California
• The Magic Theatre, San Francisco, California
• Latino Chicago Theatre Company, Chicago, Illinois
• La Compania, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• El Teatro Campesino, San Juan Bautista, California
• Long Beach Playhouse, Long Beach, California

Publications

• Man of the Flesh, Plays from South Coast Repertory, Broadway Play Publishing, New York, New York
• Prospect, Theatreforum International Theatre Journal, Issue 5, University of California, San Diego (1994)
• Santos & Santos, American Theatre, Vol. 12, No. 9, Theatre Communications Group, New York, New York (November 1995)
• La Posada Magica, Plays from South Coast Repertory, Volume Two, Broadway Publishing, New York, New York
• El Otro, Plays from South Coast Repertory, Hispanic Playwrights Project Anthology, Broadway Publishing, New York, New York

Margo Hall (Campo Santo Member)

Margo Hall is an African American actor and director, originally from Detroit, Michigan, who has performed in theaters throughout the country.  She is an original member of Campo Santo.  She has performed seasons for Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and has performed and directed in the San Francisco Bay Area at American Conservatory Theatre, The Magic Theatre, Brava! For Women in the Arts, Word for Word, Encore Theatre Company and many others.  Her directing credits include the world premieres of Joyride! By Greg Sarris, The Trail of Her Inner Thigh by Erin Cressida Wilson, and the Goodman Award winning staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.  She received a Creative Work Fund grant in 2002 for a collaboration with the Z Space Studio.

Luis Saguar (Campo Santo Member)

Luis Saguar is a native San Franciscan of Spanish and Basque descent.  He has performed seasons for El Teatro Campesino and has appeared at the Magic Theatre, Eureka Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Mission Cultural Center, San Jose Stage, Teatro Vision, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and Word for Word among many others.  He also works regularly in the film industry. He also is a founding member of Campo Santo.   Outside of Campo Santo, he has appeared in the premieres of works by Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, Nilo Cruz, Jose Rivera, and others.  Saguar wrote and performed in his first play, the award-winning production of Hotel Angulo in 2001 and has other scripts in development.

Sean San Jose (Campo Santo Member)

Sean San Jose is a native of San Francisco, primarily of Filipino and Puerto Rican background. In the mid-1990s, he conceived and co-founded the theater project “Pieces of the Quilt,” a collection of new short plays confronting the AIDS epidemic.  Started as an homage to his parents who died of AIDS, the collection involves 18 writers, including: Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, and Migdalia Cruz.  Part One was premiered at The Magic Theater in 1996. San Jose continues to work with Alma Delfina Group-Teatro Contra el SIDA, presenting these plays in schools, libraries, clinics and community centers.  In addition to being a founding member of Campo Santo, Sean San Jose has appeared at Berkeley Repertory, A Contemporary Theatre, Pittsburgh Public, Playwrights, Horizons, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and other venues. 

Michael Torres (Campo Santo Member)

Michael Torres is a California native of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent, and a founder of Campo Santo.  He has performed internationally and throughout the country, including seasons with El Teatro Campesino, El Teatro de la Esperanza, California Shakespeare Festival, Latino Chicago, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Magic Theater, and others.  Outside of Campo Santo he has appeared in premieres of works by Jose Rivera, Octavio Solis, Sung Rno, and other playwrights.  He also has participated in numerous theater-in-education programs, performing in prisons, community centers, clinics, and hospitals.

Delia MacDougall (Associated artist, participating actor)

Delia MacDougall is an award-winning actress and director.  As an actress, she has worked throughout the Bay Area at Berkeley Repertory Theater, American Conservatory Theater, the Magic Theatre, San Jose Repertory and other theaters.  Delia has collaborated with Octavio Solis multiple times in the past, having appeared in the premiere of his El Paso Blue at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco and in San Diego; and in Prospect in San Francisco.  MacDougall has directed more than a dozen world premieres in the past several years, including three works by Erin Cressida Wilson and Naomi Iizuka for Campo Santo.  She also is a founding, core member of the ensemble Word for Word, and has directed their premieres of stories by Dorothy Bryant, Sandra Cisneros, Virginia Woolf, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and others. 

Suzanne Castillo (Costume designer)

Suzanne Castillo is a clothing designer and clothing store owner in San Francisco.  She is co-Founder, designer, and Owner of Manifesto in Hayes Valley.  Castillo also has designed for music, dance, and theatre, working extensively with Campo Santo over the past several years.

Jim Cave (Associate artist, lighting designer)

Jim Cave is a veteran of Bay Area theatre, having directed, designed, produced and performed for more than 20 years.  Cave has won many awards for his designs and directing work, and has worked at nearly every Bay Area theatrical venue, including many projects with El Teatro Campesino, Intersection for the Arts, the Magic Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Eureka Theatre, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, and countless others.  In addition to his extensive design and directing work, Cave was the Co-Artistic Director of Berkeley’s famous Blake Street Hawkeyes for several years.  Among many world premieres Cave has contributed to, some award-winning highlights include co-design of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and site specific original work with Bob Ernst and John O’Keefe.  His previous work with Octavio Solis includes time at El Teatro Campesino and productions of Prospect and Santos & Santos.