In John Ford’s 1940 movie of “The Grapes of Wrath,” which Gregg Toland filmed from a script by Nunnally Johnson, there is a scene in which Ma Joad (played by Jane Darwell) goes through a box of old things—letters and whatnot—trying to decide what to throw away and what to take with her California. There’s a postcard from New York, a newspaper clipping about Tom’s being sent to prison, a pair of earrings. A pot of coffee is boiling on the stove beside her; on the soundtrack, an accordion is wailing “Red River Valley”; and as Ma holds the earrings up to her face and looks at her reflection in the coffeepot she catches sight of what she has become. The precise thing that is happening in the melody of “Red River Valley” at the moment when Jane Darwell’s face changes breaks your heart.
Anyone who attends the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” at the Cort, hoping to see this scene, or one very much like it, is in for disappointment. The Steppenwolf production, directed by Frank Galati from his own adaptation, is quiet, low-key, and utterly unsentimental. There’s nothing in it to pull at your heartstrings; it makes no appeal to nostalgia—no appeal at all to your emotions. Mr. Galati’s approach to adaptation is matter-of-fact, and his approach to direction is such that no single line or speech or scene is played in a manner calculated to move or manipulate you.
So chaste is this version of John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel that it manages to make the movie look cheap, and that’s odd, partly because the film is a great document in itself, and partly because what we’ve come to expect from Steppenwolf Theatre is that same genius for evocation—through a conjunction of music, image, and dramatic event—which we associate with John Ford. Most people who saw the 1984 Steppenwolf/Circle Rep revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” remember it as one of the signal theatrical experiences of their lives.
Gary Sinise, playing a sort of choric figure—half junkie, half stage manager—raised his arms, and the lights changed and the Springsteen music blared. A junkie has no control over his life, but, inside the Minetta Lane, Mr. Sinise could control the whole theatre—that was what was so affecting. Tom Joad, whom Mr. Sinise plays in the current production, is also a choric figure whose life has gone out of control. But there’s no self-conscious theatricality in “The Grapes of Wrath.” The sets and lighting (designed by Kevin Rigdon) are simple facts; they evoke—a lone pillar for a dooryard, a panel of siding for a boxcar—rather than trying to engulf you. The music is unamplified. And while, in the best tradition of contemporary epic theatre, there’s a certain amount of role doubling within a huge company of actors, none of it is schematic, the way the doubling in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Nicholas Nickleby” was.
Galati’s adaptation is so apparently lacking in anything like design as to resemble real life. It sidesteps lyricism and easy emotion and goes straight for whatever is salty or down-to-earth, as does Galati’s direction. As Ma Joad, Lois Smith has none of the sad, fat fadedness of a Jane Darwell; she doesn’t strive for Darwell’s sweetly reproachful hominess and command, and brings to the role instead a tentative and prosaic flakiness. Most striking of all is the way two veterans of the company—Mr. Sinise and Terry Kinney—seem to free the characters they play from the performances we remember in the movie. Mr. Sinise’s Tom is all contained anger, with none of the naiveté or sappiness that Henry Fonda couldn’t help bringing to the role. Mr. Kinney’s Preacher Casy is mind-bogglingly laconic: John Carradine without the jutting jaw and phony mysticism.
Even the music is matter-of-fact. A good deal of it is actually cynical. Composed by Michael Smith, and performed by him and a three-person band (Mr. Smith on guitar; Miriam Sturm on fiddle; William Schwarz on accordion and bass; L.J. Slavin on banjo, harmonica, saw, and Jew’s harp), it’s expositional music, by and large, not incidental, and meant to plant information about the migrant experience. The idea of drought is established by a jokey bit of twelve-bar blues; five sneering actors singing in close harmony become a breed of used-car salesman; there’s an ironic hymn to Route 66 and a talking blues made out of the towns and cities they pass. Once, as the Joads were preparing to leave their home, I thought I heard Terry Kinney tentatively picking out a few strains of “Red River Valley” on a harmonica, and later, when the Joads were settling in to one of the camps, someone was playing “John Hardy,” the song whose melody Woody Guthrie used for his version of “The Grapes of Wrath.” But even these details seem part of a narrative system—they’re facts, not heart-wrenchers. The closest you get to ambient music is a lady fiddler backing slowly offstage.
That the Steppenwolf production is so affecting—and however unmoved you feel at any given moment, a cumulative effect is taking place—is a testament partly to the quality of the ensemble acting and partly to the nature of this story. “The Grapes of Wrath” is about homelessness. All great American epics are, I think: this one, “Gone with the Wind,” and “Moby Dick,” of course, and—coming down a level or two (though you’ll think I’m being flippant)—“The Wizard of Oz.” They’re about losing whatever home you thought you had a title to and going in search of it—or in search of something to replace it. So haunting and full of meaning to us is the idea of dispossession that it matters not at all how much or how little value our experience has taught us to attach to the actual thing lost—Tara or Kansas or the farm. It is the sense of loss itself that we respond to.
“The Wizard of Oz” is a children’s story, and “Gone with the Wind” is one for adolescents. The one teaches the infantile lesson of self-reliance (home is where your loved ones are and “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard”); the other offers the dubious comfort of tomorrow’s being another day. But Steinbeck’s epic is an adult treatment of the phenomenon of dispossession; what the Joads’ gradual defeat consists of is a central fact of American life and culture: the breakup of the family.
Henry Fonda, delivering Tom’s big transcendentalist speech toward the end of the movie, sounds like a guy who knows he’s saying something important. But Gary Sinise, making the same speech to Lois Smith, is just a boy musing aloud to himself and saying goodbye to his mother.
For all its emotion sparseness, this production has moments of great beauty. Toward the end, there’s an extraordinary rain-storm effect which requires you to look through sheets of water and, behind that, through a doorway or scrim to see what is happening onstage, and you might find yourself thinking back through the production at the sequence of images and events. You might notice, for instance, that each act moves toward a coup de theatre involving water (going back to the idea of drought), that each contains a scene in which men sit clustered around a pit fire (in one case, the newly dispossessed; in the other, the newly organized), and that, in fact, the whole production has been visually designed around a series of dualities represented by Tom and Casy, each of whom is finally driven to perform the desperate act or sacrifice without which (in American culture) a man stops being a man and a philosopher stops being a philosopher. The realization takes your breath away, but what finally moves you is the curtain call: the expression on the faces of Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney (both too young, really, to be veterans of anything), which tells you how much the material means to them and what it means for them to be able to present it to us in just this way.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 2, 1990