There is a searing urgency to the lyrical poetry and luscious prose of playwright Octavio Solis. In his Berkeley Repertory Theatre debut production of Mother Road, each character has a mission to “dale gas,” a Spanish phrase that urges a firm pedal to the metal.
Despite some storytelling that veers into quizzical directions, it’s that very urgency that provides Mother Road with its sharpest moments, informed by one of literature’s most decorated novels.
John Steinbeck’s Pultizer- and Nobel-winning The Grapes of Wrath provides the texture for this modern sequel, borne of Solis’ grand imagination and brought to the stage via David Mendizábal’s sharp direction. The 1939 novel’s flawed yet virtuous hero Tom Joad is heavily present in Mother Road, as his bloodline runs deep inside his descendant, Martín Jodes (Emilio Garcia-Sanchez).
Martín doesn’t have much going for himself in California. He struggles to make ends meet as a migrant farmworker, moving from crop to crop. A marriage engagement to Amelia (Cher Álvarez) has gone kaput. So when a man named William Joad (James Carpenter) arrives with a mysterious proposition to bequeath 2,000 acres of Oklahoma land to Joad descendant Martín, the young man joins his older relative in a return trip to Oklahoma on Route 66, which Steinbeck dubbed “The Mother Road.”
That legendary stretch of highway, which held so much peril for the Joad clan, offered the false and cruel hopes of a California where golden crops and crisp bills grew everywhere. While the Dust Bowl caused tenant farmers to flee Oklahoma in the 1930s due to economic hardship, drought and agricultural shifts, Martín, despite seeing the state as less than desirable, sees it giving his fortunes a massive boost.
