Life of a Logging Family in The1930's in California
Why Steinbeck's Okies Speak to Us Today
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March 18, 1990
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The paradigm of the dust bowl migration is imbedded in American consciousness, permanently linked to our retentivity of the Great Depression. Information technology was an epic event. More than a million people, nigh of them dispossessed farm families, left the failing agricultural regions of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma during the 1930's and moved west to California. Though millions of other Americans uprooted themselves in those years, the travails of the ''Okies''captured attention in a mode those of other groups did not. That was in great part considering of the publication in 1939 of John Steinbeck'due south ''Grapes of Wrath,'' which the Steppenwolf Theater Visitor of Chicago now brings to New York in a production opening Thursday at the Cort Theater.
Steinbeck became aware of the Okies in the mid-1930's equally migrant workers poured into the agronomical areas surrounding his dwelling in northern California. Their story possessed him, and he distilled it into his account of the Joad family's troubled journey from drought-stricken Oklahoma to the simulated promise of the west. The novel had a sensational bear upon, greatly strengthened by John Ford'south classic 1940 film adaptation. Fifty-fifty 50 years later on, the book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is generally (although not universally) recognized every bit a masterpiece of American literature - and equally one of a relatively pocket-size number of of import American novels centrally concerned with issues of social and economic justice.
The director, actor and writer Frank Galati get-go read ''The Grapes of Wrath'' equally a boy. He never forgot its affect on him, particularly the impact of Steinbeck's storytelling. ''My life was shifted invisibly past the book,'' he recalls. Decades later, when he began an association with Steppenwolf, the ensemble company founded in 1976, he thought immediately of the novel as a projection for the grouping. He spent iii years adapting it for the stage and then directed the Steppenwolf production, which starting time opened in Chicago in 1988. It played briefly last year at La Jolla Playhouse in California and at the National Theater in London.
Mr. Galati, who co-adapted Anne Tyler'due south novel ''The Adventitious Tourist'' for moving-picture show, has always been fatigued to literature equally a source for theater. His Ph.D. dissertation was a report of Vladimir Nabokov, and equally a young director he took a special interest in adapting novels to the stage in ways that would ''let the characters live dramatically without losing the centre of the narrative modality.'' It is a genre he calls ''chamber theater.''
No i would telephone call his $1.five million adaptation of ''The Grapes of Wrath'' a chamber piece. With its 35-member cast, musical ensemble and length of more than 2 and a one-half hours it is one of the largest productions in New York. But there is a simplicity to the staging that reflects Mr. Galati'southward commitment to making the original story, not his own adaptation or direction, the middle of attention.
The set consists of a largely bare stage. The most significant prop is the heavily laden Hudson Super Six truck (reminiscent of the canteen railroad vehicle in Brecht's ''Female parent Courage'') that becomes the Joad family unit'southward home on its long, troubled journey. Everything is designed to draw attention to the actors and, through them, to Steinbeck'south words, story and social message.
''This production,'' Mr. Galati said recently, ''emerged out of a very intensive reading that made the essential elements of the novel clear to me. The book has a deep structure, an compages, on which all else hangs. I made that the spine of my own work.'' He contrasts his play with the 1940 film, which he admires: ''Ford brought a rich visual poetry to the story. I can't copy that on stage. For me, the language of the book is primal and the spectacle secondary.'' One reason that Mr. Galati, who is 46 years one-time, chose ''The Grapes of Wrath'' equally a project in 1985 was that he considered information technology appropriate for Steppenwolf. ''We are a young, committed, ensemble company, very much similar a family,'' he said, ''and 'The Grapes of Wrath' is higher up all else a story of family.'' (Much of the original cast has followed the product to New York. Amongst its members is Gary Sinise, who helped begin the project while serving as Steppenwolf'south artistic director in 1985 and who now plays Tom Joad. Lois Smith as Ma Joad and Terry Kinney as Jim Casy were likewise in the Chicago production.) Just Mr. Galati also had other reasons for wanting to put the tale of the Joads on stage. ''This story needs to be told once more for our time,'' he insisted. ''It tells us that buried in our success is a deep failure. Steinbeck was expressing a hope that human generosity would rescue these homeless and dispossessed people.'' He noted a parallel today in Vaclav Havel'southward recent statement to the U.s.a. Congress: ''The conservancy of this man earth lies nowhere else than in the human heart.'' We are, Mr. Galati said, ''on the threshold of a new world, at the finish of a catastrophic century. This story comes back to united states from a dark time to invite usa to reflect on what nosotros really value.''
Steinbeck, as well, was preoccupied with the question of what Americans really value. He rebelled at the idea that individualism and material success were the only elements of the American Dream. He wanted there to be something more than, and he spent much of the 1930'south looking for it.
It was a long and difficult search, and at times he nearly gave up. His 1936 novel ''In Dubious Battle'' was bleak, cynical and almost hopeless in its portrayal of a failed strike past migrant farm workers in California's Salinas Valley (and of the futile, heartless efforts of Communist organizers to harness the strike to the party's purposes). Individuals, he seemed to say, were incapable of mastering their own destinies in the face of oppression; but they were also incapable of constructive collective action. A 2d novel on the plight of the migrants, a vicious set on on growers inelegantly titled ''L'Affaire Lettuceberg,'' was bitter, angry so unsatisfying to him that he burned the manuscript. He subsequently described it as a ''mean, nasty book.''
''The Grapes of Wrath'' (whose championship Steinbeck borrowed from ''The Boxing Hymn of the Republic'') was his third endeavour at using the Okies to appraise the significant of the Great Depression. Here, again, there were signs of hopelessness. The novel'southward main characters, the Joads, come up to the stop of their long ordeal in worse shape than when they began it - the family dispersing, their possessions done away in a overflowing, their prospects bleak.
There were signs, likewise, of acrimony - in the unvarying harshness of Steinbeck'due south portrait of bankers, landowners, local sheriffs and other capitalist flunkies; in the bitter commentary on the homo costs of industrial ''progress''; and in the radicalization of Tom Joad, who, thinking he has killed a policeman, leaves the family unit late in the novel to join an undefined move committed to social struggle. He promises his female parent: ''Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' upwardly a guy, I'll be there.''
Merely to Steinbeck, as to much of the vast audition his novel (and Ford'due south film) attracted, neither despair nor rage fairly expressed the real meaning of the Low. And in ''The Grapes of Wrath'' he found at terminal a philosophical stance that expressed both his outrage at social injustice and his belief in the possibility of transcending it.
The true lesson of the times, he now suggested, was the importance of customs - not community defined in traditional, geographical terms; not the community of a neighborhood, or a boondocks, or a region; but a customs of the human spirit, for which the only real model was the family unit. The apostate preacher Jim Casy (an almost purely emblematic figure whose chief function is to convey Steinbeck's spiritual yearnings) expresses something of this idea in his diffident way: ''Maybe information technology's all men an' all women we dearest, maybe that'southward the Holy Sperit - the human sperit - the whole shebang. Possibly all men got one large soul ever'trunk'south a part of.'' Tom Joad later parrots his words as he explains to his mother why he must leave the family unit'south struggle to join a larger one.
Only while Steinbeck's men talk near a transcendent community, they mostly practise little to aid create it. The male characters die, run abroad from responsibility, get into trouble and disappear, or descend into helplessness and paralysis. It is the women in ''The Grapes of Wrath'' who have the forcefulness to endure and to lay the foundations of a new human being customs based on universal love.
Ma Joad, the centre of both the family unit and the novel, gradually expands her ain notion of ''fambly'' to include ''anybody.'' Her daughter, Rose of Sharon, helps a starving stranger by assuasive him to nurse at her breasts. (Steinbeck's publishers considered this concluding scene and then maudlin they tried to persuade him to remove it, and John Ford omitted it entirely from his picture show. Mr. Galati has retained it in his stage adaptation, convinced that it conveys the essence of Steinbeck's message.) ''Man, he lives in jerks,'' Ma Joad explains. But to adult female life is ''all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, merely the river, it goes correct on.''
To its many critics, ''The Grapes of Wrath'' is a hopelessly romantic novel, bordering on sentimentality. The treacly hopefulness and boundless generosity of its beleaguered characters ofttimes strain credulity. The political bulletin is muddled and at times naive. Just the novel'due south occasional anticlimax is part of what makes it such an important document of the Great Low. Analysts of the 1930's have long struggled to understand why in the face of such misery and distress the United States experienced so little genuine upheaval - such limited radicalism, such small-scale violence. The well-nigh frequent answer has been the power of individualism - the trend of desperate people to blame themselves for their problems, America's cultural disability to recollect in collective terms. But Steinbeck suggests another respond to that question.
He was inappreciably alone among artists and intellectuals of the 1930'southward in scorning the conventional American dream of individual success and material progress. But he scorned also the Marxist dream of a smashing commonage time to come driven by history and ideology. He embraced, instead, another social vision, no less deeply rooted in American civilization than the individualistic ethos with which information technology competed.
Information technology rested on an nearly romantic notion of the natural goodness of ''the people.'' It imagined a culture in which a simple, folkish warmheartedness - a spontaneous generosity - would compensate for, and somewhen overcome, the cruelty and oppressiveness of the economy. The story of ''The Grapes of Wrath'' is a harsh one, to be certain; but in many ways the novel's message was every bit comforting to Americans of the 1930's equally that of Frank Capra's warm, hopeful, populist comedies - and not, in the cease, very different from it.
Steinbeck was expressing a radicalism of sorts, challenging the commemoration of the individual that had then enchanted Americans in the 1920's and that many believed had caused the Slap-up Low. Simply it was a folkish unthreatening radicalism resting not on dreams of revolution merely on a faith in the unproblematic decency of common men and women. That same evocation of community has often been the source of intensely conservative appeals. Ronald Reagan loved to point to examples of spontaneous neighborliness to justify his opposition to ''paternalistic'' government. George Bush'south ''g points of lite'' similarly evoke an imagined Norman Rockwell world in which a spirit of community emerges of its own accord, without official compulsion (or Federal financing).
That ''The Grapes of Wrath'' has never stopped attracting readers, that it has become at present the ground for Steppenwolf's ambitious and scrupulously faithful dramatization, suggests the fascination with which Americans still regard the Slap-up Depression. But Steinbeck's novel is more an intriguing menstruum piece. Despite its many flaws information technology speaks to mod audiences, as it did to audiences in the 1930's, by evoking one of America's most powerful and cherished images of itself. Information technology suggests that running like a river beneath the surface of the nation's cold, hard, individualistic culture lies the spirit of Ma Joad, a spirit of ''fambly'' and community that, once tapped, might redeem usa all.
TOM JOAD, BY THE BOOK
The image is etched in the minds of the millions who have seen John Ford'south 1940 movie version of ''The Grapes of Wrath'': Henry Fonda (in photo at right) as Tom Joad, telling his mother not to worry, he will triumph, though he is forced to flee the decadent officers of the constabulary.
Now, in 1990, Tom Joad is speaking once again. ''I'll exist all aroun' in the dark,'' he says. ''I'll be e'er'where - wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people tin can eat, I'll be there. An' when our folks swallow the stuff they heighten an' live in the houses they build - why, I'll be there.''
Simply the words this time are said by Gary Sinise (below), a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theater Visitor of Chicago. The grouping'southward production of the epic John Steinbeck novel opens Th in New York.
The Steppenwolf credits of Mr. Sinise, who is 35 years erstwhile, include directing and co-starring with John Malkovich in Sam Shepard'south ''True West'' and directing Lyle Kessler's ''Orphans.'' Throughout his latest venture, he says, the image of Henry Fonda has not followed him, has not been ''ever'where,'' ''all aroun' in the night.'' He is not at all cowed about having a tough act to follow.
''I know that people identify Tom Joad with Henry Fonda, and he's certainly one of my favorite actors,'' Mr. Sinise says. ''But at that place's a whole audition out there coming to 'Grapes of Wrath' for the get-go time through the play.''
His primary source was the volume, non the movie: ''I spent a lot of time with the volume. I've seen the movie a few times. Information technology's a good film, but it's 50 years erstwhile. In the thirty's and 40'due south in Hollywood in that location were restrictions and barriers. Y'all could non exercise things in the movies in the 1940'south that yous can in the 1990'south. And the acting styles nosotros take in the 90's are different from what they were in the 40's.''
Certainly, at that place was little in those days to compare with the Steppenwolf style of acting, which has been described every bit a robust and gritty kind of naturalism with the bristling energy of the best rock-and-roll.
And just how is Mr. Sinise interpreting his function? ''Tom Joad is a very simple human,'' he says. ''He's not complex in his moral judgments or values. He is somebody who during the form of the play goes through a kind of spiritual awakening, having his eyes and mind opened to a globe much greater than his small one.
''A lot of the time he's like the mythic American hero,'' Mr. Sinise says. ''But I can't play a mythic American hero. I'm but playing a farmer who lost his farm, and whose family unit is dispossessed, and who is searching for country, and a home to call his own, and laws to protect them. He'due south somebody who just wants to find a job then he can pay for some food.''
- Mervyn Rothstein
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/18/theater/why-steinbeck-s-okies-speak-to-us-today.html
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