Jim Casy, the preacher who lost his livelihood with the onset of the Depression, tells Tom Joad, recently released from prison for killing a man in self-defense, that he feels the world is "one big soul everybody's part of." John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, the story of one Okie family's plight during the Depression, and their pathetic pilgrimage in a broken-down old Hudson to what they desperately hope is the good life in California, is by now recognized as an American myth - the myth of the grit of "the people" triumphant.
Certainly the 1940 John Ford film starring Henry Fonda as Tom and Jane Darwell as Ma has helped propagate that myth. Doubtless, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater's stage adaptation of the book will do so even further, for it is an emotionally gripping evening that superbly utilizes the resources of the stage. Before it reached its current home on Broadway, the production adapted and directed by Frank Galati, had been seen in Chicago, at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, and in London's West End. The theatrical effort culminated at this year's Tony Awards, with best-play and best-director recognition.
Nearly three hours long and gobbling up a $1.5-million budget, the production is physically impressive; but at its heart the play is nothing more than what happens when deep and complicated feelings meet and become tangled on an almost bare stage. The Grapes of Wrath is at its most thrilling when the imagery ceases and the feelings take over.
Those feelings in Steinbeck are strong, for the novel, film, and play are concerned primarily with the concept of home and what it means to people. The Joads, who never had much to begin with, are uprooted from their home and forced to seek a new life elsewhere. In America, California has always beckoned to the pioneer spirit - the gold rush, Hollywood, the land of orange groves and eternal sunshine - and it seemed even more desirable during the Depression. But the Joads were among hundreds of thousands who moved westward, in their modern, battered versions of covered wagons. What waited for them in California was more misery and severe disappointment.
Even in these days with homelessness so talked of by the media in America, it might be difficult for the ordinary theater-goer to imagine what it feels like to not have enough to eat, to wear rags, to be filthy, and the exist without hope. Today it is essentially an us-and-them scenario, but during the Depression there were many more have-nots than there are now. For those who have, The Grapes of Wrath at least evokes what it might be like to have not. It also tells, as W.H. Auden put it so succinctly in his libretto for Benjamin Britten's Paul Bunyan, how "America can break your heart.”
The opening set for The Grapes of Wrath - a wire fence running diagonally along a twilight landscape - suggests the great expanse of America. A narrator tells us that "the dawn came, but no day.” The meeting of Tom Joad (Gary Sinise, who occasionally sounds like Henry Fonda) and Casy (Terry Kinney) on the road has the bareness of Beckett's tramps meeting in Waiting For Godot. In the world of the disenfranchised there's no such thing as sin or virtue, as Casy suggests, but "just stuff people do."
Extraordinary Achievement
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