In one year, as a teen, about twenty years after the Great Depression’s end, I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, saw John Ford’s film of the novel, and heard Ramblin’ Jack Elliot at a club sing Tom Joad by his legendary mentor Woody Guthrie who had grown up in Oklahoma’s dust bowl. My own parents had endured the depression’s drought and a precarious farm existence in the 30s, and the memories that haunted them as a result have stayed in my bones to this day. Therefore, thus influenced, I feel much enthusiasm and one or two specific doubts about Frank Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck at the Avon.
To begin with one of the outstanding features of the production, Antoni Cimolino’s direction wastes no opportunity to mine human character, all the while placing the Joads and company evocatively in an epic dimension. His care with character-revealing detail in both lead and minor players repeatedly creates a compelling and textured production. Let me give two examples, both outside the main and spoken action. First, Tom sits with his back to the group and Rose of Sharon, still insecure with his return from prison, approaches him from behind and tentatively but lovingly places a jacket on his shoulders and then, burst free of caution, hugs him.
The second involves young Abigail Winter-Culliford as Ruthie and very young Gregor Reynolds as Winfield, both placed down stage when Ma reveals that Granma has died. Winfield in a quick glance looks imploringly at his sister with concise and precise hopelessness. Meanwhile, Ruthie in a few moments conveys shades of inner wonder at seeing California, unaffected compassion for Winfield, and sensitivity to the many human pulsations around her. Earlier, Ruthie has lifted a sack- of flour? – and thrown it onto the truck and in one grimace and strain you know it is quite heavy.
Ironically, Evan Buliung as Tom Joad, Tom McCamus as Jim Casey, and Chilina Kennedy as Rose of Sharon, in their expert fusion of human depth and its mythic implication, expose the play’s Achilles heel. On one hand, we have a complex and profoundly subtle exploration of human suffering and dignity in these and the other characters and, on the other, we have the same play doing a surface treatment O, Okie where art thou?
Buliung makes “ordinary” an art because we sense in subtle clues his struggle to understand brutal injustice. He embodies human vulnerability edging toward self-respect and becomes a quintessential everyman who is firmly present as an individual but who also mirrors and stands for his surrounding social conditions. His face slowly reveals internal pain, humiliation and growing rage. He is assertively average but becomes epic with the realization that “They’re working on our decency”.
The Casey of Tom McCamus is thinking all the time and like Tom and Ma, his thoughts are not abstractions but slowly evolving response to a dire social situation. Casey’s presence is solid and easy, with wisdom being the heart of the man. He is the play’s thematic anchor and its symbolic narrative because he progresses from victim to activist, from man of spiritual struggle to man who finds spirit in human struggle against social and economic pressure. His struggle for purpose, and not the musicians’ lyrics, are the play’s inherent chorus.
Chilina Kennedy’s Rose of Sharon is quietly volatile, a young woman not so much naïve as inexperienced, not so much a victim as a seed of human hope. If memory serves me correctly, Steinbeck has a scene with a turtle on its back on the highway trying to right itself and escape potential danger. Such is Rose of Sharon’s and all the other Okies’ progress, from hopelessness to self created salvation. When Rose of Sharon nurses a dying stranger, we sense a purpose much larger that he and she in this deed of mercy. We see the reason for life and it is a truly beautiful theatrical moment.
John Arnone’s set and Steven Hawkins’ lighting design and Carolyn Smith’s costumes all contribute to a striking visual experience of human hopelessness with implied salvation. We have a panoramic sunrise or sunset behind potently evocative setting devices: four posts suggest a countryside, a doorway suggests a wood frame house, and signs of poverty abound and make their effect in dark dirty hues in clothing and makeshift tents. Cimolino accentuates the latter with a mother picking lice from her child’s hair.
Although the economical text suggests inner character through select details and although Cimolino takes great pains that his characters speak fluently in their silences, I find that these features are diluted somewhat in the overall tone of the play. The brutality of the “red” – obsessed thugs in California becomes somewhat incidental, stylized and thus almost neutral in effect. At one point, the sad story by the Man Going Back of starving children with bloated bellies is followed by a functional song about route 66 that serves narrative purpose in general terms but kills the horrid story’s impact.
The play in Cimilino’s production has two outstanding realizations of an everyman figure, both played memorably by Buliung and McCamus. With flavour-generating performances like those of Randy Hughson, Janet Wright, Victor Ertmanis, Peter Hutt, and the rest, the commentary in the songs’ lyrics seems often unnecessary. Certainly, though, when the very capable instrumentalists weave melodic lines and harmonies throughout the play’s progress, they as such contribute to the production’s texture.
The lead singer, however, although he has a pleasing and versatile voice, deliberately misuses it with deviation into a conspicuous mannerism, very much unlike the actors. It’s folkie affectation, one that evolved after the folk boom of the 60s but has no origin in the music of the 30s. As noted already, the fine cast we have here can and should stand on its own without being undermined. There is so much that is haunting and memorable in this production and also two glitches that make one wonder if the play is trying to avoid its potentially devastating impact.