Playwright Octavio Solis has forged a reputation for rising to artistic challenges. Whether he’s telling the necessary stories of growing up a few blocks from the Rio Grande in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, or he’s adapting literature from the Western canon into contemporary dramas, Solis creates characters and situations that audiences intensely respond to. His latest work, Mother Road, takes up the themes and issues of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and imagines the descendants of the novel’s Tom Joad in the present. The play received its world premiere to mixed reviews at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2019.
Solis has kept Mother Road mostly out of circulation since then, waiting for the right situation to unveil a more polished, refined version, which will debut at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on June 14. In an interview from his home on a small farm outside Medford, Oregon, Solis tells me that he and director David Mendizábal mostly cut dialogue that made characters “too self-aware.” Solis also changed the gender of one character from male to female. “They just need to be the characters and not be a mouthpiece for my political views,” he says. “They just need to be who they are.”
Solis and his wife, Jeanne, moved to Oregon after living in San Francisco for 25 years. They’re about a 20-minute drive from Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where Solis’s plays have been produced and he is also a member of the board of directors.
In Texas, where he was born, Solis trained to become an actor. He started writing out of necessity, he says, creating parts for himself to play. His plays gained support first from San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts and Magic Theatre and later in Southern California at South Coast Repertory. With early works such as Man of the Flesh, La Posada Mágica, and El Paso Blue, Solis centered the untold Mexican American experience on regional stages across the country in a fresh and revelatory way. In the succeeding decades, he became an essential U.S. literary figure.
Steinbeck is not the only major writer Solis has found himself reevaluating. He adapted the classic Spanish novel Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, for the stage by creating a contemporary comedy drama that explores issues of modern immigration and is also an entertaining valentine to Mexican American culture. Solis tells me that his Quixote Nuevo, which had its world premiere at the California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes) in 2018, has become his most produced play to date. (In summer 2025, a revised and updated Quixote Nuevo will be a part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 90th season.)
In 2018, City Lights Books published Solis’s Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border, a collection chronicling his childhood on the Texas-Mexico border. He also served as a cultural consultant, along with Lalo Alcaraz and Marcela Davison Avilés, on Pixar’s animated film Coco (2017) after Disney triggered a public relations catastrophe when it tried to trademark the term Día de los Muertos in advance of the film’s release. The consultants’ involvement contributed to the film’s overwhelming worldwide success.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I’d like to talk about the genesis of Mother Road, but for that I think we have to go back to The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck.
Yes. The Pastures of Heaven was a collaboration between Cal Shakes and Word for Word. They wanted to adapt a Steinbeck novel, and they were thinking of East of Eden, but East of Eden was just too massive, so they didn’t do that. They then found The Pastures of Heaven, a novel of short stories, and they sent it to me, and I really dug it, and I said, “OK, I’ll do this.”
We did a lot of research. We went, of course, down to Salinas and to Corral de Tierra, which The Pastures of Heaven’s location is based on. We also had a lot of cooperation from the Steinbeck Institute.
Because The Pastures of Heaven went so well, the National Steinbeck Center decided that the following year they would focus on that novel for their own festival.
I was a keynote speaker [at that festival, in 2013], and I happened to overhear that the next year they were going to focus on The Grapes of Wrath, because they were going to celebrate the 75th anniversary of that novel. They were going to take a road trip from Sallisaw [Oklahoma] all the way to Bakersfield, tracking the same journey that the Joad family takes in that novel. I just had to do it. I horned my way into the project, and I went with them.
How did the story in the play develop from that journey?
I didn’t get what the story was until the very last leg of the trip—at the Weedpatch Camp outside of Bakersfield. It’s still there, and it’s still a functioning labor camp for migrant workers. Except that this time the migrant workers are not Okies or people from the Dust Bowl but migrants from Mexico. It’s a government-sanctioned labor camp, one of several across California. There I met a young man who had been raised at that camp, and he wanted to tell me his story of him and his mother.
He wanted to tell me how he really connected to that novel, that it felt like the novel was really about him and his people, our people. That’s when I knew what the play had to be.
My story, of course, is very different from the one he told me, but he opened the window enough for me to ask a fundamental question, which was, What if the descendants of Tom, what if Tom Joad, who disappears at the end of the novel, went to Mexico, where an outlaw would normally go? What would he do?
He would raise a family. [His children] would have families, and their families would have families. Eventually, they’d come back. What if a migrant worker now is actually a direct descendant of Tom Joad? That was the question that I asked, what if, and the play opened up from there.
The idea of how our cultures meld and transform themselves seems very natural and organic, at least in this time. It doesn’t seem far-fetched that the Joad family could eventually have morphed into these Mexican American migrant workers. Why not?
It seems highly plausible, completely plausible. It was a way to make a direct connection between the migrants that came from Oklahoma and the migrants that come from Mexico today, that still come and go on the pisca, following the harvest, doing the work of the harvest.
In a sense, you’re very much collaborating with Steinbeck even though you bring a much different sensibility.
Coming back to The Pastures of Heaven reintroduced me to Steinbeck in a more organic way, feeling like, “You know what, he’s a California writer like me. I need to know him. I need to know his works.” The Pastures of Heaven was my entrée, and then on to The Grapes of Wrath again. It felt like a brand-new novel to me. I hadn’t read it since high school. I realized how influential it was to me because the final scene just riveted me.
I’ve never forgotten that final scene. It made complete sense to me, and it oriented me as a writer in a unique way. I read East of Eden, which I found even better. I think East of Eden is his masterwork. It’s a masterpiece. It is epic. It is huge. It is monumental. I don’t think people really understand, maybe because of East Coast–West Coast bias, they don’t understand just how profound that work is. How really, to me, it is the great American novel. It does have a sweep and depth and sagacity that feels so natural, but also it comes from tremendous craft.
In both adapting The Pastures of Heaven and writing Mother Road, which felt like completely my work, I knew that I had to honor the legacy of Steinbeck.
Steinbeck was an incredibly generous writer with a Shakespearean view of humanity. He knew how to stand up for those who didn’t have a voice, who were disenfranchised, who were underdogs, who were the ones that had been trodden on for the sake of money.
Even as I knew that what people were interested in was not a Steinbeck play but a Solis play [laughter]. They wanted my play. That’s the realization I made with Don Quixote—that in the end, they didn’t want the Cervantes novel. They wanted an Octavio Solis play responding to Cervantes, and that’s why Quixote Nuevo has really just borne so much fruit.
What were your duties as a cultural consultant for Coco?
Our task was to be the firewall between what was authentic and what was not authentic to the culture, because Pixar wanted to get it right. They wanted this to be a gift to Mexico, and they didn’t want their audiences to shun the film because it was inauthentic.
So how did you do it?
Everything passed through us. The designs of the clothes, the designs of the shoemaker, the use of the songs, the kind of dances they would do, the kind of music they would play. We became arbiters of that. We were not allowed to give notes on the actual story, but only on things that were culturally unsound.
I’ve heard Pixar has quite a story process, but you’re a storyteller—they didn’t want story notes from you?
At some point, I said, “No, you know what? You missed an opportunity here. Story-wise, this is what you could have done here. Otherwise, it’s just the chase, chase, chase, and that gets boring. At some point, you had an opportunity here.”
When the gates closed, there was a time that the two characters could have spoken across the gate, and that would have been really cool. They did it. They changed it.
What about the intricacies of language and the different versions and translations of the film?
For this country, it was initially going to be all English, all of it. I said, “No, it doesn’t work. Not if you want the American audiences to get into it, because American audiences need that flavor. We’re code-switching all the time.”
We insisted that there should be more Spanish. They gave us pencils, and we watched the film again. They asked us, “Write down what you think should be translated into Spanish.” They changed a lot of those words. We helped with the translation.
They listened to those notes. It still meant, though, that when it premiered, the three of us were probably more terrified than anyone else—other than the filmmakers. Because if the community in L.A. did not go for it, if they found that like, “Oh, this is not good,” we would get blamed. Not the filmmakers. We would get blamed. The filmmakers would say, “You said this was OK, and it’s not. We have egg on our faces, but it’s your fault.” We were nervous, but at the end, it worked out.•
Mother Road runs June 14–July 21 at the Berkeley Rep, Peet’s Theatre, Berkeley.
