Take an 80-year-old, 169,000-word novel, which begins with a journey halfway across the country, in the midst of the Depression, features the death of important characters, violent fistfights, a murder, the burning of a camp, a woman giving birth to a stillborn baby, which is moreover filled with pittoresque asides and a little bit of agitprop, and turn it into a play. To complicate matters, stage this play in the middle of a plague; film it (because people won’t be able to see it in person) and make it available in the only way practical: online.
The good news is that the American Shakespeare Company’s touring players get out of this amazing project alive, giving value and pleasure to theatergoers, now prisoners of the coronavirus.
This is not to say that Frank Galati’s adaptation has all of the virtues of John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-winning novel, or that the José Zayes-directed production is without flaws. Even Steinbeck’s text hasn’t escaped criticism; the great novelist and writing critic John Gardner called the book “a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil,” although, to be fair to Steinbeck, the novel was published in the eleventh year of the Great Depression, and there was no more audience for a nuanced treatment of Steinbeck’s villains — unchecked, rampant capitalists — than there was for a nuanced treatment of the Nazi regime ten years after World War II.
If anything, Galati’s treatment is even less nuanced than Steinbeck’s, though, and very straightforward: paroled after serving four years for manslaughter, Tom Joad (Michael Morét) meets up with an old friend, Jim Casy (Alexis Baigue), who had retired from the preaching business when he concluded that he would actually have to believe in God to do the thing with authenticity. They reach Tom’s family farm, only to discover it abandoned, the frame of the house bent and the air swirling with dust. The crops have failed, the bank has foreclosed, and the family has moved on to live with Uncle John (Chris Bellinger). When Tom and Jim catch up with his family, they discover his mother (Mia Wurgaft) and father (Kenneth Hopkins, Jr.), packing to take off for the promised land of California, with a huge raft of relatives — granma and grampa (Madeline Calais and Topher Embrey); rambunctious brother Al (Andrea Bellamore), brother Noah (Sophia Beratta), who is mentally challenged, sister Rose of Sharon (Sara Linares), who is married to Connie Rivers (Andrew Tung) and pregnant, and various other younger brother and sisters. Tom and Jim get on the truck with them and head out on Route 66.
The upshot is, of course, that it’s all a scam — that the people who distributed the handbills which seduced the Joad family and hundreds of thousands like them to abandon their bankrupt farms for well-paying jobs in the orchards and orange groves of the Golden State were simply trying to flood the labor market so they can get backbreaking labor at low wages.
We get that in the second Act, in which, with the Joads bereft of their land and their dreams, Tom and Jim struggle to organize the workers and win a living wage (by which I mean a wage that you would need to keep from dying of starvation). The rapacious farming combines and corrupt law enforcement officials are waiting for them. There are real fireworks in this Act, and even though many of them take place offstage, the tension is palpable and real.
Not so much in the first Act, largely due to Galati’s decision to turn the first half of the novel, roughly speaking, into the first half of the play. Steinbeck used the first eighty thousand words or so to pour the complicated foundation of his story; the Joads, in his telling, were not necessarily saintly people. Grampa was a bit of a bully; Granma weaponized religion; the Joad men were not at all interested in what the Joad women thought about anything. Steinbeck acknowledged the plight of the Oklahomans forced off their land by the foreclosures, but was quick to point out that they, or their ancestors, did the same to the native population, resulting in the Trail of Tears. Moreover, he gave them all complications and idiosyncrasies, so that we were more likely to love them, and they were more likely to break our hearts.
No play — not even Coast of Utopia — has enough space to fit in all of that, and so Galati jettisons most of it. We get neither Noah’s confusion nor Rose’s otherworldliness; granma and grampa seem pleasant, even enjoyable, although granma does go on about the Lord. Thus the first Act seems strangely subdued, as if the Joads were just going on vacation. Jim gives a grace before supper, which in the novel served (like the sermon at the start of Moby Dick) to set out the moral geography of the play. Here it seems vaguely tedious, since the play will only have time to set out the struggle of the Joads, and all such people at the time, to survive, and not to get into theological matters. That grampa dies as they leave Oklahoma — astonishingly, singing a song before he goes — seems more like a logistical problem than an emotional crisis. (They don’t have the money for a death certificate, let alone an official burial, and so must inter him by the side of the road with a note which says that he wasn’t murdered.) The novel suggests that grampa died because he could not bear to leave his land (and the play hints at it, too) but in Galati’s version grampa can’t wait to fill his belly with California peaches, and is the first to board the truck.
Which gives rise to another qualm. ASC is a leader in cross-racial casting (when Galati first did the play, in Chicago, the director’s use of Black actors caused some critics to claim that the production ignored the prevailing racism in America in the thirties, but it is not an issue here) and cross-gender casting (Bellamore is outstanding as Brother Al; when he aggressively canoodles with a woman [played by a male actor] she is utterly convincing). But there is no such thing as cross-age casting. With copious makeup and studied application of technique, an actor can age, but I could not buy Calais and Embrey, who seemed in their thirties, as the frail, soon-to-die grandparents. ASC makes it even more confusing by double-casting them as the youngest Joad children. When they are not on the long road to the endless no, they are scampering around like kittens, giggling and snorting.
Well, enough complaining. Let’s talk about what makes this play good. There is, first of all, the outstanding performance of Wurgaft as Ma Joad — a meaty role to which Wurgaft gives full measure. Ma Joad is generous, patient, shrewd, and at times calculating. She makes it her business to hold the family together, for the same reason that Ben Franklin wanted to hold the colonies together. “How will he eat?” she cries out, when she learns that Noah has abandoned them to try to support himself through fishing. But when she realizes that recovering her oldest son is out of the question, she shuts down and prepares to push on. You can see the icy self-control descend over her, and that’s Wurgaft’s doing. Like many other fine actors, Wurgaft shows much of her character by what she does when she’s not talking. Ma Joad (Steinbeck did not gift her with a first name) is, in Wurgaft’s portrayal, preternaturally alert, and quick to pick up on things others are not.
Hopkins, too, does excellent work as Tom’s father (called in the playbill “Pa”). Tom, Sr is a man overwhelmed by circumstances; like all men of the thirties (and of most other times as well), he is defined by his ability to care for his family materially. Hopkins shows a man whose efforts to show strength mask a hideous insecurity borne of his circumstances; his overarching characteristic is confusion, which he desperately tries to hide. Hopkins nails it.
Morét is an engaging Tom, Jr., but I’m not sure that I see the complexities that Steinbeck wrote into him. Tom Jr. seems almost to be an older (White) version of Bigger Thomas, prone to violence in the face of injustice because he doesn’t have that much more in his toolbox. I didn’t get that from Morét, or any other subtext which would help me understand how he ended up as he did.
On the other hand, in a much less complex role, Tung is sterling. If there is a villain in the Joad family, it is he, and Tung sets him up nicely. From the very first scene, Tung’s Connie exudes a sort of blankness; when there is conflict, he recedes, and without saying or doing a thing you can sense the coldness and indifference in him. This is nice, layered work by Tung and director Zayes.
The Grapes of Wrath is available for pay per view. Details and tickets
Zayes deserves kudos for something else, too — knowing, and applying, the difference between live and filmed stage productions. The fine actor Kerri Rambow once described in an interview how the first time she did film work the director immediately recognized her as a stage actor, by her large gestures and emphatic speech. Zayes recognizes that acting in a filmed production is often done by the face, and, if by the voice, softly, and with nuance. The filming is generally done correctly, close to the actors; the occasional ill-advised overhead shots are kept to a minimum, and thus did not disturb the fictive dream very much.
This is not ASC at its absolute best — for that, see Much Ado About Nothing — but it is a good, honest production of a capable adaptation of a classic piece of literature, and beats hell out of watching Tiger King for the fifth time.
The Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Frank Galati from a novel by John Steinbeck, directed by José Zayes . Featuring Michael Morét, Andrea Bellamore, Mia Wurgaft, Kenneth Hopkins, Jr., Sophia Beratta, Topher Embrey, Madeline Calais, Chris Bellinger, Andrew Tung (who also served as music director), Alexais Baigue, and Sarah Linares . Thomas J Coppola, assisted by Colin Mackey, was the stage manager . Produced by American Shakespeare Center . Filmed on the Blackfriars Playhouse stage . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
