The beats that manifest inside 15-year-old Mateo’s head range from banger to bangerest, an ascendant musicality crafted from ambient sound. As an example, back in the day, radio static might mean a continued search for a clear signal to get some tunes for cruising. For Mateo, that same static is just another way to enter the cypher and drop some sickness with a quickness.
Diane doesn’t fully understand her precocious teen, which doesn’t make her different from a lot of parents. The two may have their differences due to Mateo’s status as a professional teenager, but a deep, profound love fuels their critical mission of a road trip from Ohio to San Diego in order to find Mateo’s birth mother.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “A Driving Beat,” a metaphorically rich play by Jordan Ramirez Puckett, has a lot going for it, including a story that compels for multiple reasons. It benefits from delightfully fluid staging from director Jeffrey Lo. The script itself has moments that are tender and touching, but other moments that are outlandish and inane.
Mateo (Jon Viktor Corpuz) has a deep desire to learn how to drive, with the perfect opportunity to take on the open road with his mom Diane (Lee Ann Payne). Along the way to San Diego, there are many interactions that are inspiring yet harrowing, the challenges of a white mother and brown son staring down the barrel of racism in some intolerant locales. Their travels intersect with a variety of characters — a hotel secretary, a brutal border patrol agent and a waffle waitress humorously all looking like the same person (Livia Gomes Demarchi).
The play moves through a series of scenes that cover all bases of the old-fashioned American road trip. There are discussions about out of state license plates, teenage flrtations with the motel mini bar and some joyful conversations about the virtues of Mexican “móle,” but with mayo. It’s the delicate connections between two veteran performers such as Corpuz and Payne that make this buddyish road trip funny and warm. In addition, there are some slick flows, with Carlos Aguirre credited as the show’s beat maker.
Many of the scenes are a delight, with a great assist from a new intimate space that TheatreWorks utilized for the play, performing in a three-quarter studio setting. Christopher Fitzer’s more muted but pragmatically functional design is ready for a new room.
The play peaks with one particular scene, equal parts magical and devastating. While Diane has been reckoning with the loss of her partner for the past 10 years, she allows herself a lapse of short passion with a new love interest. Lo’s direction caresses the moment with such tenderness, the height of Puckett’s writing and a scintillating connection between Payne and Demarchi, both simply transformative in this moment, Demarchi’s character provides a warm entryway, while Payne’s superpower is the way her Diane chooses to proceed forward before the guilt-filled flood of the past chops her down.
The same cannot be said of one of the show’s final scenes, which comes off as sloppy and unserious. The script in such a critical moment undercuts an arc that compels for most of the show’s 90 minutes, thrown away when Mateo comes face to face with a nurse to ask questions about his birth mother. These are questions the nurse cannot legally answer unless she owns the title as the worst nurse ever.
Sadly, it seems to be a title she covets.
What is offered to the audience is a silly, absurd and downright cruel deus ex machina, a situation where Puckett’s writing needs to highlight a greater understanding of truth in these situations. It’s an unfortunate slip-up that weakens the plot in an otherwise tender play about our past traumas, privilege, identity and how culture shapes our own perceptions and perspectives in the world that surrounds us.
While the play does many great things despite other problematic aspects that make it a struggle, there is a lot there with more growth and development to be had.
One thing that makes the play soar is its understanding of what Mateo and Diane need out of life. Like both of them, in the world of our own personal journeys through life’s highways, we are all in a constant search for the series of sick beats which will hopefully someday fill our searching souls.
‘A DRIVING BEAT’
By Jordan Ramirez Puckett, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
Through: Nov. 23
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $69-$79; theatreworks.org