It’s tempting to fall into the heaviness of these emotions,” director Ciera Eis tells a group of actors. “Keep it light. It’s more effective emotionally to keep it light.”
At eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, I’m at a rehearsal for Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, a new play exploring the life of the Depression-era documentary photographer. Written by Tess Taylor, the show is part traditional theater, part multimedia experience, with five actors performing in front of moving projections of Lange’s images and words. The 65-minute production, opening November 7, will run in conjunction with an exhibit of Lange’s photographs at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art through December 7.
Lange is remembered for her portraits of displaced workers during the Dust Bowl—especially Migrant Mother, her image of a careworn woman surrounded by her children that put a face on human suffering during the Great Depression. For four decades, Lange traveled California and beyond on assignment for magazines (including Life and Aperture, the latter of which she cofounded in 1952) and institutions like the Farm Security Administration. She documented many problems in American life, from Japanese internment in World War II to the breadlines of San Francisco to the living conditions of sharecroppers in the American South. Her work can still feel eerily relevant, touching on pertinent issues like climate change, homelessness, and the mistreatment of immigrants and minorities.
The actors in the room, who’ve been studying Lange’s work, know what Eis means by heaviness. They nod in agreement.
“Keep it light,” someone echoes.
Last West is a collage play—a theater piece assembled from preexisting materials, including text, images, or sound. Aside from the words spoken by Poet, a sort of narrator, played by Val Sinckler, the dialogue is primarily made up of comments Lange overheard or observations from her journals. When working, Lange carried a three-by-five-inch notebook where she jotted down observations. These fragments give poignant glimpses into the America she encountered. “Gets by on $1/week,” Lange wrote of a person she met. “Sold everything little by little,” reads another note. She recorded one woman saying, “This country’s a hard country. If you die, you’re dead—that’s all.”
As the actors rehearse, I begin to understand how complicated it is to coordinate moving visuals, live performances, and history in a palatable, dramatic way. One scene is set in Manzanar, a World War II Japanese internment camp where 10,000 detainees were held against their will by the United States government. Lange and fellow photographer Ansel Adams were hired by the War Relocation Authority to document Manzanar. Instead of allowing Lange to publish her photos, which revealed the horrors of the camps, government officials seized the images.
Toward the end of the production, Valerie Fachman, who plays Lange, climbs onto a wooden trunk and places her camera beside her feet. The actors call out the name of the Japanese Americans Lange met, and she responds with details about their lives.
“Haino Kashi,” says one character.
“Chemist,” says Lange.
“Sam Hori,” says another character.
“Gardener, baby,” says Lange.
This call-and-response is timed with an image sequence. First, Lange’s picture of Manzanar appears: a rectangular building with rows of identical cabins on each side and an American flag in the foreground. When the actors recite the name, Lange’s handwriting travels across the photograph as if she’s currently writing in her notebook. The scene has the effect of humanizing the people Lange photographed, allowing them to “speak” their names while giving a few scant facts about their lives.
Last West started as poetry. In 2013, Taylor, who’d then published one book of poems, stumbled upon Lange’s lesser-known photographs and discovered they included portraits of her hometown of El Cerrito, located only a mile from where Lange lived in Berkeley. Taylor soon visited Lange’s archive in the Oakland Museum of California, where she first encountered the journals. According to Taylor, Lange’s written notes were “staccato snippets and interwoven with the voices of people she had recorded along the road.... They felt like found poems.”
From January to October 2019, Taylor followed Lange’s travels through California, visiting the places she’d photographed and writing poetry in response to what Taylor encountered there today. Taylor learned that the places Lange documented often continue to struggle with the same issues or have changed for the worse. In Imperial County, the field where laborers picked carrots now has a detention center. In another area, the migrant-labor housing Lange and others championed had been torn down.
The resulting poetry—a dialogue between Lange and Taylor across time—was published in 2019 as Last West by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Soon after, a director friend mentioned that it would make a good play, an idea Taylor found exciting. The current play, supported by a grant from Carnegie Mellon, has taken more than four years to complete.
In rehearsal, Poet stands in the center of a circle of chairs holding a binder and speaking simultaneously to the audience and Fachman’s Lange. She describes her delight in discovering Lange’s photos of El Cerrito: “My town,” she says. The pictures are full of the promise of middle-class life. Still, Poet acknowledges, Lange’s work often reveals the country’s shadow self, the dark side that doesn’t quite live up to the American dream—not for everyone, at least.
“There was always this paradox,” says Poet. “Hope and beauty, beauty and its cost, the country settling new folks while moving others out. The country and what it promises, the myth and what it gives. Look at this one.”
Here, the audience is presented with one of Lange’s photographs. Two men, one with a suitcase, the other with a backpack, walk past a billboard on a gravel road. The sign is advertising train travel, with a catchy slogan and an illustrated man leaning back in a chair next to the word “Relax.” It’s a sharp contrast to the men walking along the dry, dusty road, who presumably can’t afford to rest in luxury as a train whisks them to their destination. The slogan almost seems to taunt their poverty, underscoring the irony of the image. Lange and Poet read the words together: “Next time try the train.”•
LAST WEST: ROADSONGS FOR DOROTHEA LANGE
November 7, 2025–December 7, 2025
Sonoma Valley Museum of Art
551 Broadway, Sonoma
Joy Lanzendorfer’s first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Raritan, the Atlantic, and Ploughshares as well as on NPR and for the Poetry Foundation, among others.
