Culinary innovation and a focus on sustainability are a big part of Bay Area culture, so it’s no surprise that the Berkeley Repertory Theatre has taken up food as the theme for an ambitious series of performances the company has commissioned. The performances won’t be ready until next year, but I recently got a look behind the scenes at the creative process.
Eighteen playwrights are crafting unique short dramas with a wide diversity of themes, from fad diets to the hardships that migrant farmworkers face. At least two San Francisco-based playwrights, Octavio Solis and Lauren Gunderson, are letting the theme of food take them inwards, towards narratives that contemplate self-doubt and self-realization.
Octavio Solis’ one-act play Scarecrow opens on a barren piece of land, where a tired farmer fights off despair at the failure of yet another season. Danny desperately wants to grow organic crops and is struggling to understand why his good intentions aren’t bearing fruit: “Carrots like dead baby fingers,” laments Danny in the current draft of the script. “Clay for broccoli. Tomatoes lacking all life and juice.”
Playwright Solis hails from a family that once farmed land in Mexico, but he has never tilled soil himself — yet. He and his wife, Jeanne Sexton, dream of starting their own organic farm in Oregon, where they’ve already bought land. But first they must learn more about farming. The Berkeley Rep commission is pushing him deeper into this process, Solis says, through field trips and hands-on research that inform his writing.