With tropes from Greek tragedy and classic road-trip books and films, plus a text that judiciously mixes the poetic and the profane, longtime playwright Octavio Solis’ “Mother Road,” a Berkeley Repertory Theatre production, couldn’t be a more generously, richly imagined drama.
As a sort of century-later sequel to John Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” it follows the Joad family’s original Route 66 journey, but in reverse. Tom Joad’s Depression-era travels went from Dust Bowl-choked Oklahoma to a golden state rumored to offer well-paid farmwork to men like him.
But that California promise turned out to be illusory.
In “Mother Road,” William Joad— long ago left behind in Oklahoma when Tom, his cousin, headed for Bakersfield — is a tough old man dying of cancer (played with his usual low-key, intense focus by James Carpenter).
William grew up, keeping the original family farm in Oklahoma going all these years. Now that his life is ending, he wants to safeguard it from commercial interests, from being carved up for development, by keeping it a Joad family enterprise. With help from his long-suffering lawyer friend (Michael Moreland Milligan), he discovered one possible remaining Joad descendant, Martin (a forceful Emilio Garcia-Sanchez), a young Mexican American farmworker in California.
The play begins when the two meet.
Solis invented a post-Steinbeck Tom Joad who emigrated to Mexico and married a Mexican woman there. Hence Martin’s last name, Jodes, is pronounced the Spanish way.
There’s so much in Solis’ two-hour-plus play, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches.
There’s the five-day road trip from California to Oklahoma that quite effectively anchors the overall plot; a romance involving an abandoned fiancée; rootsy acoustic music (composed by Ritmos Tropicosmos); and a poetic chorus whose members also play a variety of roles: state troopers, a waitress in a roadside diner (Courtney Walsh, particularly strong in a memorable scene), and townsfolk with racist prejudices and personal, long-held agendas. “Old grievances take on a life of their own,” remarks William.
There are companions William and Martin pick up along the way as they head to Oklahoma, where William plans to ceremonially hand over the deed to the land to his young heir. They include Martin’s cousin (played by Lindsay Rico, offering comic relief as a future organic farmer masquerading as a goofball) and lost souls such as a Choctaw Native (Benny Wayne Sully).
And there are enactments of events from the characters’ pasts, woven into the present.
The effectively visceral set by Tanya Orellana boasts an actual truck, cobbled together from old Ford parts at center stage on a rotating platform and handily morphing into a roadside diner, motel room and more.
While these elements could be uneven or confusing, here, as directed Berkeley Rep Associate Artistic Director David Mendizábal, everything is tight, carefully focused and emotionally involving as the characters incrementally change and grow over the course of five days.
A few misses: The chorus is basically unnecessary amid the myriad plot points. Its carefully observed, succinctly expressed statements about heritage, preserving the land and treatment of disenfranchised people in our ethnically diverse country feel repetitive, not hypnotic as intended. Plus, the romance in this male-dominated play is disappointing.
Still, “Mother Road” is suffused with Solis’ full-hearted concerns and compassion. The legacy of ancestry, the threat of corporatization, of exploitation of those perceived, in our country, now as then, as “other”—all ring true.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s “Mother Road” continues through July 21 in Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $24-$134 berkeleyrep.org.
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