‘Mother Road’ at Lyric a blunt, urgent indictment of America

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It’s become one of the most lamentable and frequently frustrating tropes in modern American entertainment to endlessly rehash the classics and to resurrect seemingly every long-respected property for a brand new sequel that no one asked for and no one needs.

But every so often, there’s a story that begs for updating and pleads for a new understanding of its relevance to the modern world.

And it’s difficult to think of any other true classic that bears more resemblance and relevance to our modern world than “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s immortal yarn of family, faith, and fortitude being crushed under the heel of the American Dream.

With our current America so clearly and completely once again resembling Steinbeck’s America of the 1930s – with rampant labor exploitation, inflating poverty, wealth-hoarding, environmental degradation, and racist nationalism – the National Steinbeck Center commissioned an official modern-set sequel to “The Grapes of Wrath.“

But rather than put it in the hands of another white novelist, the stewards of Steinbeck’s estate and memory handed the reins to Mexican-American playwright Octavio Solis, one of the most acclaimed and prolific Chicano voices in American entertainment.

The result is “Mother Road,” an intense and vulnerable new play examining the descendants of the ill-fated Joad family running now through April 19th at Lyric Theatre in The Plaza.

Solis’ play picks up 90 years after the events of “The Grapes of Wrath” saw the infamous Tom Joad flee for the safety of his family following a deadly episode spurred by his uncompromising belief in human dignity and his hatred of capitalist cruelty.

But from the words and the mind of Solis, the story takes a broader, more culturally encompassing stance, casting the modern Mexican-American as the same disrespected and indentured laborer and focusing much of the story on the minority experience in present day America with chemical pestilence replacing the Dust Bowl.

And in a grand reversal, the story hinges on a road trip down Route 66 – the “Mother Road” – from California and to Oklahoma, because while Steinbeck’s story was about clinging to a dream when your home has been lost, Solis’ story is about holding onto your home when your dreams have been killed.

Elderly William Joad has traveled all the way to California from his ancestral family farm in Salisaw, Oklahoma. He’s trying to track down the only remaining descendant of the famous Tom Joad so that he can bestow the farm onto the last Joad before he dies and make good on a promise to keep the land in the family.

The man he finds – the great-grandson of Tom Joad – is a young Mexican-American man born of the line that Tom began after fleeing to Mexico after the events of Steinbeck’s book.

But William is determined to keep his promise, so they set off onto the Mother Road with cultures, ideologies, personalities, and tempers all clashing just as badly as their clashes with police, racist locals, and their own tumultuous pasts.

This is a decidedly different, and even risky, production for Lyric.

For starters, it’s definitely not a musical. Though there is a creeping soundtrack that scores the many transitions and passages of time beneath the unison-spoken poetry of the road-wandering chorus (and one moment of song near the end,) you shouldn’t be expecting anything like musical theatre.

It’s also much more brutal, more emotionally intense, and more conceptually unforgiving than what you might expect from “the official state theatre of Oklahoma.”

Solis pulls no punches, and in fact throws quite a few straight to the gut with his largely blunt, unapologetic exploration of the indignities and injustices that have persisted in this country for the past century, merely reframed and repackaged rather than ever being solved or properly addressed.

It’s all terribly effective and heartbreakingly real thanks to the two central leads, Lyric veteran Stephen Hilton as William Joad and newcomer Gage Martinez as Martin Jodes.

Their volatile, dramatic chemistry and endlessly believable emotional intensity lift the show far beyond what you’d expect from even the best regional theatre, with both of them eliciting their own gasps, recoiling shocks, and yes, tears from the audience in turns.

They’re augmented throughout with a game supporting cast, elevated by the fantastic Alexandria Yolie and Isaiah Williams, who each occasionally provide a bit of much-needed levity, but still retain the humanism and vulnerability required of such a play.

It’s a testament to the restraint of Lyric’s producers and their often visually impressive designers that the set is kept so starkly minimal throughout, with only a large pickup truck prop and some roadside electrical poles to occupy the space.

Any other visual flourishes would feel out of place and unnecessary and would detract from the two true focuses of the show: the staggering performances and Solis’ own evocative prose.

“Mother Road,” then, is an admittedly strange animal.

It’s a story about the true-life hardships and infinite struggles of the ignored underclasses and the bottom rungs of a soulless capitalist society, but it’s told through a medium most often reserved for the culturally elite and intellectual.

Maybe Solis understands that it’s more important for the comfortable classes to experience this story than it is for those that live it every day. Maybe he knows that the visceral intensity needs to be experienced live rather than through the safety of a screen or on a paper page.

Maybe Lyric knows those things, too.

Whatever the reason, the home of “Mother Road” is the stage, and we should count ourselves as lucky that a story of such pointed urgency and such uncompromising commentary is available to us right now.

“Mother Road” runs now through April 19th at Lyric Theatre in The Plaza. For showtimes, tickets, and more information, visit lyrictheatreokc.com.

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