If you were a child in the ā90s who wore a bonnet for fun, there may be no phrase in the English language more mordantly comforting than: āYou have died of dysentery.ā
Between the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, pioneer American Girl dolls with tragic backstories, and the alluded to computer game (released on floppy disks for Microsoft DOS in 1992), I was one of those strange eight-year-olds. So when I found out that Portland Center Stage was producing Bekah Brunstetterās The Oregon Trail, a play about a grown-up ā90s kid rediscovering the joys of traveling the trail, I was sold.
Until I actually saw it.
Brunstetterās play centers on Jane (Sarah Baskin), an unemployed 25-year-old crashing on her sisterās couch, who plays The Oregon Trail in between avoiding the job search, drinking heavily, and sleeping with inappropriate men. Sheās a mess, basically, and probably clinically depressed, although the play kind of dances around this fact.
Thatās too bad, because one of Brunstetterās strengths is her choice to embed sad adult themes within the confines of a beloved childrenās computer game. And for a play thatās ostensibly about depression and many forms of survival glimpsed through a deceptively whimsical lens, The Oregon Trail is disappointingly lightweight. The playās sentimental, tacked-on ending passes off Janeās depression not as depression at all, but as superficial, early-twenties existential ennui. But thereās a difference between feeling sad and not being able to get out of bed or hold down a job, and itās annoying to see debilitating depression depicted as something that a little bootstraps ingenuity can solve. I was nearly as irritated by Brunstetterās dialogue, which can be obnoxiously cute: At times, it sounds more like the idea of how millennials talk than how millennials actually talk.
If you loved The Oregon Trail, thereās probably enough here to keep you entertained. The soothing MS-DOS interface the play opens with (Leif Norbyās wonderfully charming voice-over listing Janeās options as the game itself), Emily Yetter as Janeās more well-adjusted sister, and the comfortingly low-tech logo of the MECC educational computer software company written large above the stage. There are some creatively employed songs from the late ā90s and early ā00s (although I canāt say I was psyched to hear Bushās āGlycerineā almost in its entirety).
But itās hard to argue that it wouldnāt be more fun to just play The Oregon Trail, which you can now do online, for freeāa fact written into the script of this Oregon Trail, just in case you didnāt already know.
(I did.)