Playwright Octavio Solis envisions the Texas town of El Paso not as a border town but a hybrid city-state that's both Mexican and American.

It's a place where borders are blurred, contradictions prevail and cultural ambivalence is the only certainty.

That makes El Paso a fitting location and title for his play "El Paso Blue" that's being given a well-directed, superbly and subtly acted production by Quantum Theatre.

The venue for this latest Quantum offering is a small corner of a huge, vacant riverside warehouse in Lawrenceville.

The performance space is enclosed in translucent plastic, which makes it not just pleasantly warm, but provides an otherworldly sense that enhances the play's mood.

Scenic designer Tony Ferrieri provides distinctive settings for each of the play's half-dozen locations across a broad expanse of dirt-covered playing area.

Each is apt and individual in conveying place and mood. But they cover such a broad expanse that scenes played at the far end seem remote when you're seated at the other extremity. It's not enough to make you regret attending, but it does make you wish you'd arrived earlier to get a more central seat.

Solis wrote his play for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1999.

That doesn't keep it from being a timely and intriguing addition to the rhetorical border war that's waged daily on talk shows and political platforms throughout the country.

Though two of its central characters are a Mexican-American son and his Mexican immigrant father, its themes of assimilation, loss of culture and dislocation would likely be familiar to anyone who has tried to find their place in an unfamiliar place or culture.

Rendered in 95 minutes with no intermission, the plot of Solis' play is a mystical nocturnal journey in which two buddies -- the recently out-of-jail Mexican-American Alejandro and his bungling-burglar Anglo pal Duane -- search El Paso and its environs for Alejandro's wife, Sylvie, and his dad, who have run off together. Accompanying Duane and Alejandro on their quest is China, a tough-talking, scrappy young woman, proficient in bilingual profanity, who serves as their culturally grounded spiritual guide.

It's a brief but interesting balance of poetry and country-western music, myth and mysticism embroidered with themes of father-son rivalry and Oedipal tragedy overlaid by an atmosphere of ethnic dislocation.

Sheila McKenna directs with a light hand, allowing the drama to grow organically through Solis' script and the actors' performances.

In creating Alejandro's pal Duane, Jeffrey Carpenter does his usual exemplary job rendering the hapless loser as someone who's clueless, ill-starred, calamitous and more than a little weird.

John Marcinizyn underscores the evening's action and emotion with his onstage presence as a musician plucking guitar strings to realize composer Michael Herman's musical background and bridges.