From Steinbeck to Solis

By Sarah Rose Leonard

Octavio Solis’ Mother Road descends directly from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Commissioned by The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, the play carries on the legacy of the novel’s protagonist Tom Joad and his extended family as they travel from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. Mother Road reverses the Joads’ migration, traveling from “Weedpatch,” a migrant farmworker camp in Bakersfield, California back to Sallisaw, Oklahoma. You will meet two characters who are Joad descendants: William, Tom Joad’s first cousin, and Martín, Tom Joad’s great grandson. Along the Mother Road (Route 66) Solis’ Joad family collects strangers and friends from their past.

Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family captured the American imagination. Every character’s story is interspersed with prose-poem interludes that paint a wider picture of the circumstances of the Great Depression. Steinbeck effectively causes his readers to understand their struggles as functioning inside of the problematic system of American agricultural economics. His simple, plain-spoken language and rich, detailed plot found wide appeal. The novel brought attention to the struggles of migrant farmworkers in America, arousing nationwide sympathy. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1940.

The novel earned Steinbeck a reputation as the “conscience of America.” Growing up among farmworkers raised his consciousness about workers’ struggles. Steinbeck was born in Salinas — the “salad bowl” of America — in 1902 to a working-class family where he developed a close relationship with nature. He spent his free time in the fields, and often spent summers in Monterey and Big Sur by the ocean. He decided to be a writer as a teenager. While attending Stanford, he signed on only for those courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, some science. The President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, "had no other interests or talents that I could make out. He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else."

To pay his way as a writer, he worked as a manual laborer and beet harvester. The people he met on these jobs deepened his empathy for workers. His first three novels (Cup of Gold, The Pastures of Heaven, To a God Unknown) did not find success, but he broke through with Tortilla Flat in 1935. This series of humorous stories follows Monterey-based Mexican Americans on various adventures. His next novels followed agricultural laborers: In Dubious Battle (1936) tells the tale of a strike, and Of Mice and Men (1937) dives into the bond between two displaced migrant laborers. In 1939, he published The Grapes of Wrath. Both of those novels became famous films, furthering Steinbeck’s popularity.

Steinbeck’s impressive body of work, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and East of Eden (1952), shaped America's perception of rural laborers, raising awareness about the sources of the injustices they faced. His approachable, imaginative writing married social criticism with a fierce love of the land. Each novel contains rich symbolism, lifting up his characters’ struggles to an almost mythic level, while still grounding them with details of their quirks and flaws. Though Steinbeck lived the later part of his life in New York City, where he passed away in 1968, his fictional worlds took shape in California. His ashes reside in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.

The playwright Octavio Solis began his relationship with Steinbeck’s work in 2010, when he adapted Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven, a collection of short stories. The resulting play premiered at California Shakespeare Theater with the SF-based company Word for Word, which theatricalizes short works of fiction. That project introduced him to the National Steinbeck Center. In 2013, Solis joined the Center on an 11-day trip that retraced the Mother Road route of the Joad family, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath. The journey began in Sallisaw, OK, a region where thousands of impoverished families like the Joads had to abandon their farms, and ended near Bakersfield, where the Joads found paltry work. Solis joined two other artists and staff members in collecting oral histories from Dust Bowl survivors and their descendants. Solis re-read The Grapes of Wrath on that road trip. He reflected, “One young man told me, ‘We’re the new Okies, and I’m the new Tom Joad.’ So, I thought, what if Tom had gone to Mexico and married a Mexican woman? What if Tom’s only descendant today was a Mexican living on this side of the border?”

Solis’ writing, like Steinbeck’s, has strong themes that he deepens and complicates with each new project. His characters live in in-between spaces spiritually and literally — much of his work takes place on, or is psychically about, the U.S./Mexico border. Solis was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, half a mile from the Rio Grande. As a kid, he saw up close the charged encounters between migrants and the Border Patrol. Those early impressions of people struggling with daily life on the border imprinted on his imagination and led him to create a body of work that both draws inspiration from and expands beyond the Mexican American experience.

Solis began his career as an actor but transitioned to writing partially to create more roles for Mexican American artists. He moved from Dallas to San Francisco in 1989, where he developed rich collaborations with the Magic Theatre and Intersection for the Arts. He wrote plays for El Teatro Campesino, a leader in the Chicano theatre movement during the 1960s that has a perfect tie to Steinbeck: it was founded by a group of farmworkers and artists dedicated to educating workers about the need for a union. Solis’ early years as a writer saw him blending poetic prose with personal-as-political narratives. He also found a love for adapting classics from Shakespeare to Spanish Golden Age theatre. His Man of the Flesh (1987) adapts the Don Juan play, The Trickster of Seville, to Orange County, CA, where a Chicano womanizer is dispatched by his father to work as a gardener for a rich white family. In Dreamlandia (1998), an adaptation of the classic Spanish play Life is a Dream, each dream opens doors to the next, creating a profoundly trippy effect on the audience. The 1990s–early 2000s saw Solis’ plays produced on stages across the country. Most recently, you might have seen his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, entitled Quixote Nuevo at Cal Shakes in 2018. This Quixote rants at his windmills: drones in the sky, operated by border patrol. Solis is now one of the most-produced Latine contemporary playwrights in the U.S.

His works are full of visions in many forms, not only dreams, but myths embodied, hallucinations, religious revelations. This style of writing is perfectly at home in the theatre, a place where leaps of imagination are required for any travel to happen. And like Steinbeck, Solis’ characters go on epic journeys, but are rooted in their homes (for Steinbeck, California, for Solis, the border). His immigrant characters struggle to leave and struggle to stay.

In Mother Road the chorus says, “Family new-made of so many.” Solis' Joads create a chosen family on their road trip, and upon their arrival in Oklahoma create a hard won, forged home. This echoes Steinbeck’s Joad family, who lose blood relatives on their journey and gain friends upon their arrival who help them survive harsh circumstances. Both writers articulate the experience of home being something you lose, remake, and find again. In an article on Solis’ work, the theatre scholar Todd London writes that his Joad character’s arrival is “weary, elegiac, and full of a hope that can only come with facing the real-real.”

Both Steinbeck and Solis define what it is to be American, yet their work centers around people who are perpetually searching to belong. Perhaps this continuous striving for a defined identity is what makes us Americans, never settling for being one thing in a home for immigrants and their descendants. Solis identifies with this in-between state as someone who has always moved between worlds. He says, “The real life, the real me, is Mexican. Still, Mexicans reject us and tell us that we should embrace our Americanness. Instead, we are somewhere between realities.”

And Steinbeck — through the portals of time — answers: “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”