This particular play is about an estranged mother and her precociously initiative daughter going on a road trip stretching from Paoli to Yellowstone, both seduced by the idea of a getaway. The daughter is living with her father who is granted full custody by the court in the divorce between her father and mother. The little girl aged fifteen at the time was called Olivia and her beloved father Aaron, but he has married another wife, who is a nasty piece of work in how she treats Olivia.
The little girl calls her mother Beatriz a pretty distressed and angry Cuban woman whose intuition to solve the dilemma at hand is to go on a road trip. This paper will be looking at the variables and events that influence’s Olivia’s journey to self-identity but even with that it will be unfair failing to mention a few of the geographical occurrence that also help her discover the woman she wants to be. Olivia is living the suburbs of West Philadelphia with the resentful stepmother and a constantly emotionally distant father. Her father is from a Jewish background while her mother is from a Puerto Rican origin.
Olivia is a sensitive girl with an expansive mind, so she spends her time locked in her room where she obsessively writes and reads materials on ‘National Geographic’ all the time while dreaming of the world away from Philadelphia. She gets her most anticipated chance to explore the world when her mother sweeps her away on a road trip. The two, mother and daughter, are estranged and are quite different in their mannerisms and despite spending time a few times before, most of their time together is spent learning how to be in each other’s company.
Olivia and her beloved mother Beatriz are fully-realized individuals, and their conversation is unexpected and amusing and randomized but very careful not to discuss generic topics like relationships. The play ideas based on the author’s personal experiences, somewhat different and similar in a suspicious manner. The character Olivia is a fifteen-year-old girl from a background of different origin, and she had a different complexion as compared to her darker family members just like the author, this brought a different kind of treatment, and it was the fundamental origin to write the play.
The book written in 1986, a time where there were no cell phones, and escaping our lives and exploring the world was possible. Olivia is a distinct aged fifteen because around this time is when a young girl is trying to answer questions like the kind of woman she would grow up to be. The play, set in an outdoor scenario for good reason, the issues raised in the play about them discover their identities cannot answer when seated in the comforts of their sitting rooms, seeing those issues in a different context can be liberating eye-opening.
The author talks about a similar experience when she talks about her attending adolescent programs when she was on a trip with her mother. Olivia missed out on a lot because of lack of a female role model which would give her the sense of self and cultural identity. Even after her trip, her being back at home, she did not feel that she had completed her journey of self-realization. Olivia is an avid writer and processes her issues of abandonment by putting them down in blog-like passages. The estrangement between her and mother by a ruling rendered by the court granting the father full custody depriving her time with her mother.
They didn’t see each other from an early age, no visitation or contact not even an annual ritual between the two of them, a total banishment from her daughter’s life. The play begins with a traumatizing event at the school for Olivia, and she makes a phone call to her mother seeking emotional support and a listener’s ear, seeking an ally of her distant mother. No matter how stressed out she is, Olivia doesn’t let it out when speaking to her mother. The mother leaves her husband in bed, and drives over and picks her daughter up.
The instant connection between the two is remarkable despite not being in contact for quite some time. It’s impressive how the play holds the storyline in track while navigating through the emotional roll-coaster between all the characters. Olivia gets the much needed loving support she is longing for, teaching her how to write her hurt down on paper instead of lashing out or letting it NIL herself. Olivia’s writing helps her get a grounded sense of everything around her and more reasonable with what is happening in her life.
On their trip they admire the landscape, Olivia, in particular, was taken by the mountain and was extremely inquisitive taking notes as they talked. She was growing into maturity, and her writing down what was happening to her gave her some common ground with her mother bring them closer together in spite of their broken relationship. It greatly helped her with the female role model, she lacked in her life. It also helped her understand and get closer with her emotionally distant father when at the end of the play she handed him the notebook.
Olivia’s particular interest in ‘National Geographic’ materials focused all her intelligence and liberal mind into something far much more productive. This continuous and obsessive reading related to her life in a unique way as she talks about erosion and other geographic images and their understanding to human about the world. Writing how damaging relationship built on resentments like her and her stepmother and the emotionally distant father is eroding a well-being and her mother banished from her life by the court ruling doesn’t make things and more bearable.
Through the play, we read how Olivia struggles to realize who she is amidst all this turmoil in her life and the trip with mother comes as such a welcome relief to her and gives her a different context understanding of what is happening around and how to deal with them appropriately. Long after the trip we see, Olivia eventually gets some grip on the direction she wants her life to the head and her trying to rebuild her relationship with her mother. Through the storyline of this play, the men play a minor part; their tasks shadowed in the background.