Eugene weekly., March 21, 2019, Page 13, Image 13

Doak Creek
Native Plant Nursery
Create Habitat For
Butterflies, Birds and Bees.
Plant Northwest Native
Plants In Your
Landscape.
Please call for an appointment
541-521-9907 By Appt.
83331 Marlow Rd. Eugene doakcreeknursery.com
MOTHER ROAD: FIDEL GOMEZ(CHORUS), CEDRIC LAMAR (CHORUS), TONY
SANCHO (MARTÍN JODES), CARO ZELLER (CHORUS), ARMANDO DURÁN (CHORUS)
PHOTO BY JENNY GRAHAM
in the 1980s, and irony has been made irrelevant by the election of Donald Trump.
Hairspray might once have been provocative; now it’s a sweet nostalgia piece — but
for all that, a lot of fun. Go see it and enjoy.
Mother Road
Angus Bowmer Theatre through Oct. 26
Playwright Octavio Solis, who lives outside Ashland, got the idea for this play —
which made its world premiere in the Bowmer Theatre on March 10 — when he was
invited by the National Steinbeck Center on a trip exploring the original Route 66.
That route — the “mother road” of the play’s title — is the blue highway followed by
hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to California
in the 1930s. It’s also the route followed by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath.
In an interview last month, Solis said the idea for his play didn’t fully form until well
after the trip.
“I knew it was going to do something, but I had no idea what it was going to be. I
didn’t even imagine that it would be a play, because the National Steinbeck Center
doesn’t have a stage.”
Sometime later he met a young Latino artist at the Arvin Migrant Center near Ba-
kersfield, California. “And he said, the thing that really landed with me is, he said, ‘I
am the new Tom Joad. And we are the new Okies.’”
At that moment Solis knew he had a play. “I had no idea it was going to be as big a
play as it was as I wrote, but I should have realized it, because The Grapes of Wrath is
an epic.”
At the end of Steinbeck’s novel, Tom Joad apparently kills a cop and disappears
into the night, after giving a famous farewell to his mother, Ma Joad.
In Mother Road, Solis imagines what happens next: Joad flees to Mexico, where he
settles in and raises a family.
As the play opens, the hardscrabble William Joad (Mark Murphey), a distant Joad
cousin who still owns a 2,000-acre ranch in Oklahoma, is trying to track down a Joad
descendant — any descendant — to whom he can leave his property when he dies,
soon, of liver cancer.
To his surprise — OK, shock, actually — his lawyer finds an heir: Martin Tomas
Jodes (Tony Sancho), a quick-tempered 30-something farmworker in California who
is the only remaining descendant of the Joad line.
The two men, white cracker Okie and brown-skinned Mexican, meet, clash and fi-
nally agree to drive to Oklahoma in Martin’s battered Dodge pickup named Cesar,
following the old Route 66, to get Martin installed in his new life as a land baron.
The journey is played out on a simple set by Christopher Acebo and relies heavily
on video projections by Kaitlyn Pietras.
Solis’ play, directed by Rauch in his final season at OSF, is a great concept that falls
a little flat in execution. Mother Road is very much a story with a moral, so much so
that half the time you’re watching you feel like you’re in church. The ensemble opens
the play with what can only be described as a liturgical tone, which is cemented when
the traveling duo eventually encounters crazy James (Cedric Lamar), a reference to
the Christ-like failed minister Jim Casy of the Steinbeck novel.
Somehow that underlying churchy tone causes everything to bog, as characters
explain their own and each others’ motivations, in case you didn’t get it. All ends hap-
pily and a little too predictably, with a speech in which Martin says, essentially, that
we are all Mexicans, obliquely echoing those eloquent last words from Tom Joad to
his mother before he disappears.
“I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people
can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there….”
For dates, times and tickets of all plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, visit osfashland.org.
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M
Educating Children
for Life
Serving preschool
through grade 8
The Eugene Waldorf School is a non-profit, non-
sectarian, tax-exempt organization incorporated
in the State of Oregon. We do not discriminate
on the basis of race, color, national origin,
ethnicity, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation,
disability or marital status in the administration
of our educational policies, admissions or board
membership policies, financial programs, or
athletic and other school-administered programs.
541.683.6951 • 1350 McLean Blvd. • EugeneWaldorf.org
QuickStopCannabis.com
(THE CORNER OF 7TH & CHAMBERS)
Deals of the Week:
$39.99 for 7 grams
of indoor grown
Stinky Pete Flower
$11 for 3.5 grams
of Jack Herer
Flower
29.8% THC
This is one of the best fl owers you
can buy. (Regular price $80.00)
22.15% THC
Great fl ower for mowing the
lawn or cleaning the house!
If you haven’t been to Quick Stop yet,
you’re truly missing out!!!
Come in and meet our knowledgeable & attractive staff,
except for one questionable old dude!
$9 for a 1 gram Asteroid Joint
Flower, Kief and oil all in one joint
30+% THC Enjoy the ride on an asteroid!
Only while supplies last! • Price Includes Tax
No Medical Card or JAIL Time Required
Visit us or Order Online!
A lot of Easy Parking at
1681 W. 7th Ave., Eugene
(541) 393-6857
Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the infl uence of this drug
For use only by adults 21 years of age and older • Keep out of reach of children
M A R C H
2 1 ,
2 0 1 9
13