7 Visions of Encarnación

Seven Visions is a love story and a quest for cultural identity through a spiritual vision journey written to coincide with the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). It features a skeleton narrator, La Calaca Flaca, a young monk, Encarnación, a native girl, and a priest, set in an early California mission. Encarnación is surprised one day to see a skeleton pop out of his body.

What are you?
Think of me as Encarnacion... minus the carne. You're swelled up with so many visions they knocked me right out of your body.
How do I get you back in?
You have to dream them all one by one, until there is room for me again.

The skeleton then leads him through a series of fantastic adventures that help him come to terms with both his past and his future. In many ways, Encarnacion is the first Chicano.

Written by Octavio Solis with music by Richard Marriott and Cascada de Flores, the story rides on a bubble of traditional Mexican music and sung narration (corridos) in both English and Spanish. Seven Visions was workshopped at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and performed at Brava Theater in San Francisco in 2003 and 2004.