It was serendipity that placed us at the Rogue Theatre in
Tucson to see the Frank Galati adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath last month. The serendipitous part was that it was also my father’s birthday. He
would have been 112 years old on January 27th 2018. As we watched the retelling of this iconic
novel I kept thinking back to Dad’s own life. He was not an “Okie” and he had
made it through the 1930’s without the kind of disruption that plagued the Joad
family, but his early life in rural Wisconsin prior to and during the First
World War did have a parallel that is hard to ignore. He came from a large family that had a peripatetic downward spiraling existence. Dad's grandfather owned a farm but his father
had been reduced to a tenant by just before WWI.
Then dad's father disappeared during WWI and left my grandmother with five
children. Total poverty was the
controlling factor until after the war and it forced my dad and his older sister to
withdraw from high school to help support the family. Dad's dad and my grandfather did re-appear after the war, but
the family never recovered economically. I apologize for this too
long preamble on the Rogue Theatre production, yet what I was thinking about as the production began does have a bearing on my reaction.
The production just plain started out for me on the wrong foot. In the early moments several characters appeared bare footed and as
they displayed their clean, smooth, lily
white, unblemished extremities all I was conscious of was that these our actors
were miles away from struggling hard scrabble farmers in the midst of walking
to California. I am sorry for the bad
pun but thank heaven most were shod fairly quickly and remained so for the
duration. Yet the lack of grit and sweat
of that early image continued to nag.
The chosen minimalist semi-Brechtian production style was understandable
given the reasonably small wing space and the demands made by a large cast and
multiples scenes. The stage was bare and backed by a full width cyclorama. A
manual turntable dominated stage right.
Benches tables, poles, and some cloth were piled up to be used to
construct the truck and all other scene locations.
Musically the show continued the Rogue’s use of live instrumental
accompaniment. A violin and guitar/banjo player provided pre-show music and
this couple continued into the play to underscore and provide scene
bridges.
Prominent for acting accolades was Matt Bowden’s
appropriately smoldering Tom Joad-- all dark browed and bearded. I also liked the contrast of Cole
Potwardowski’s Al Joad. There was
youthful confidence along with the devilish sexuality of his uncontrollable
glands. Cynthia Meier’s Ma, I am sorry
to say, just never connected with me. Not always was I sure that she
effectively played her own suffering aspect before she declared that keeping on
keeping on is the only possible human choice. She told the story, but the
challenge of the role is to also live it and at that point the Brechtian
narration seemed to win out over the emotion of the character.
The company, even at 20 strong, was faced with constant
doubling making it hard to accept the minor players as anything other than
narrators and scene shifters. All but
the most essential props were mimed and this choice also exposed us to
differences in pantomime competency. The
ensemble did attack their challenging role changes with vigor and it made no
matter if they were in a character or manning the spokes to rotate the
turntable. I did, however, feel for the
girl who had to hold up a blanket in Act
II. It seemed like an eternity and my seatmate commented on it as well.
Lighting and sound moved us effectively from scene to scene
with scrim silhouettes and campfire flicker effects deserving of notice. The best technical kudo was saved for last
and the combination of sound and lighting and actor sound and movement during
the climatic storm proved to be a fitting highlight of the performance.
The costumes were clearly dust bowl and kept to a palette of
umbers and blues, but many looked too clean and unstressed for folks who are
making a long, hot, sweaty, physically debilitating journey. This may have been part of director Joe
McGrath’s commitment to commenting on rather than submerging us in the grunge
of the journey, but it also accounted for my feeling that some grit was missing
in the production. Luckily, as noted
just above, the ending met the challenge. The culminating image of Rose of
Sharon striking a pieta pose combined with nourishing the starving man was
worth the price of admission alone. Perhaps it was just the jarring start that
kept me from involvement early on, but I can’t help feeling that in the early
going the pace just seemed too relaxed and lacking focus. Act II provided
redeeming action and dramatic tension, but it was not enough to turn a very
good production into a great one.
