By Robert Avila

THICK DESCRIPTION'S 1993 premiere of Santos and Santos at Theater Artaud not only established Octavio Solis as a major American playwright but also inspired the formation of Campo Santo, one of San Francisco's most exciting theater companies, which chose Santos and Santos for its inaugural production in 1996 and has continued a fruitful collaboration with Solis ever since. In the world premiere of Bethlehem, playwright and company embark on a slippery, macabre, compassionate exploration of the darkness of the human heart.

The story finds New York journalist Lee Rosenblum (Sean San Jose) arriving in El Paso at the home of a notorious murderer, Mateo Buenaventura (Luis Saguar). Mateo, recently released from a 12-year sentence in a prison mental hospital for the brutal slaying of a high school girl (Anna Maria Luera), whose heart he cut out before having sex with the body, claims to have no memory of the crime and now lives a reclusive existence with his mother (a quietly powerful Catherine Castellanos). Lee's assignment is to obtain his story, and with it perhaps a clue to the riddle of unaccountable evil.

The journalist revels in his assignment. "My Rockports on his turf!" he marvels, measuring the distance from New York to El Paso by a cultural gulf more formidable than the raw miles between them. But the initial impression deceives us. Knowing he must bridge this cultural gap if he wants Mateo's story, Lee cottons up to the killer by revealing his own roots in the same borderland and his abuse at the hands of his biological father. A closet Mexican American, born Leandro Guerra, Lee was made over as a New York Jew by his stepfather after his mother's death. The revelation of this closely guarded secret leaves his photographer and sometime-lover Dru (Marcelina Willis) incredulous but wins him an interview with the mysterious and darkly charismatic Mateo. Under Mateo's mysterious spell, however, Lee progressively blurs the line between his subject's past and his own. "Brother, you can disown the memory," Mateo tells him, "but it's the memory that really owns you."

Compounding the ironies and metaphors at work here, Mateo carries within him the transplanted heart of another young woman, the victim of a car accident. Her mother, the evangelical Ms. Dewey (portrayed with wrenching intensity by Margo Hall), remains suffused with anguish over the fate of her daughter. Convinced Mateo is the devil himself, she keeps a vigil outside his home in an empty gesture of maternal protection. Mateo, meanwhile, a war veteran and loner with a trickster personality, may in fact be the devil for all we know, or just your average American psychopath. He has a sinister, ungodly gravity about him that seems to swallow light (as Dru finds when she tries to take his picture) and inexorably pulls Lee into his psychic orbit. As the action spans the border between El Paso and a Mexican village, Lee and Mateo plumb the depths of depravity while erasing the line between dream and reality.