Spotlight Sundays: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
Spotlight Sundays: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
October 18 from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Two Performances at 1 pm and at 3 pm
For this month’s Spotlight Sunday join us for a live production of Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, an immersive one-hour play written by Tess Taylor and directed by Ciera Eis. Last West was born from OMCA’s archive of Lange’s images and notebooks and returns to bring this legendary Bay Area photographer’s stories to life. We will travel with Lange as actors perform the journey outlined in her road journals and oral histories, and witness again the California we experience today. Set against a stunning projected backdrop of Lange’s photographs, this offering is a meditation on witness, migration, and time.
This production is a culmination of a weekend of programming centering and celebrating Dorothea Lange’s life and work. Kick off the weekend on Friday, October 16, 5:30–7:30pm with a free public symposium at UC Berkeley’s Northgate Hall, featuring Last West creator Tess Taylor and Ken Light, UC Berkeley Professor of Photojournalism. Saturday, October 17, 1-3pm join Last West actors from the production in an intimate day of teasers with pop up monologues in OMCA’s Galleries of Art and History right alongside Lange’s displays. Free with gallery admission.
Explore more of Lange’s work in our latest special exhibition, BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration, an augmented reality (AR) experience that brings new context to Lange’s iconic 1942 photographs. We invite you to join us for this special weekend of programming and experience Lange’s work through new perspectives, stories, and voices.
Accessibility
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is committed to providing programs that are accessible, welcoming, and inclusive of our community. Wheelchairs, sensory inclusive devices, and additional amenities are available for checkout on a first come, first served basis at the Ticketing Desk. To request other accommodations, like American Sign Language (ASL), Cantonese, Spanish or another language interpreter, please email visitor@museumca.org at least three weeks before the event. Learn more about our accessibility options.
About last west creators
Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright, cultural critic, and the author of five poetry collections, including Rift Zone and Work & Days. Her fifth collection, Come Bite, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in April 2027. She served as the 2024–25 Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, CA as a 2024 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow. She has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Saint Mary’s College, and Whittier College, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange—originally written in the OMCA Archive— began as a collage poem commissioned by MoMA in 2020, and has grown into an immersive theater piece.
Ciera Eis (she/her) is a theatrical director who develops socio-political new work, with an eye for the queer, messy, visceral, and wildly funny. She has developed new work at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, and Shotgun Players, with recent directing credits including Love U: Queer New Musical (Z Space), Faust on 4Chan (The Ground Floor, Berkeley Rep), and Circle Mirror Transformation (Custom Made Theatre). For five years she produced Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor new-work residency, and she has served as Artistic Director of both Custom Made Theatre Company and FaultLine Theater. She is a 2024 Directors Lab West recipient and a 2019–2021 SDCF Observer.
Ryan Yu is a Bay Area–based media and projection designer working across theatre, dance, and music. For Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Ryan built the production’s immersive visual world, translating Dorothea Lange’s photographic archive into a living, shifting backdrop that moves with the performance.
Sara Witsch (she/they) is a Bay Area sound designer, production specialist, and self-described noise-maker, with a degree in Theater Arts from San Francisco State University, where she studied sound design, production, and performance for the stage. Her sound work has been heard in theatres and unexpected outdoor spaces across the Bay Area, as well as in podcasts, radio plays, film, and video games. The Bay Area Reporter has praised her designs as “inviting from the moment you enter the theater, and enveloping once the action gets underway.” Sara is Co-Artistic Director and Production Manager of SoundPlay Media, a collective devoted to sound-specific performance art.