New production at Berkeley Rep finds Octavio Solis revisiting the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ story — and it’s a wild ride.
From left, James Carpenter, Lindsay Rico and Emilio Garcia-Sanchez perform in Octavio Solis’ John Steinbeck-inspired “Mother Road” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
The playwright has long had a yearning for the West and its denizens, the searchers and the dreamers who haunt its epic landscapes and contentious borders in works from “Santos & Santos” to “El Paso Blue.” Here he revisits the fate of Steinbeck’s immortal Joad family, refugees of the Dust Bowl who came to California seeking refuge from the deprivation of the Depression only to toil, forever penniless, in the fields.
The play revolves around a battered green truck carrying a grizzled old farmer named Will and a young farmworker named Martin who realize to their great chagrin that they are both descended from Tom Joad. They bristle against that connection at first but eventually come to see that they both share a longing for the land, a sense of rootedness amid a restless culture.
The wind sings a dirge. Weeds swallow up rusty old trucks. Tanya Orellana’s stark set of ramshackle wooden barns with Cha See’s lights beaming through the cracks in the slats and Jake Rodriguez’s sound making the ground rumble help conjure this hardscrabble landscape of highways and dirt, blood and hunger.
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