Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Frank Galati, directed by Antoni Cimolino
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 1-October 29, 2011
“Vintage”
With Stratford’s new production of The Grapes of Wrath, director Antoni Cimolino, who is also Executive Director of the Festival, has given notice that Stratford is still more than capable of presenting serious large-scale modern drama. It is a stunning achievement. Both the subject matter and the presentation style are challenging, but Cimolino does not attempt to soften either. It’s clear that both he and the play have inspired the enormous cast to give their very best.
The play is the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel that Frank Galati wrote and directed 1988 for Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theater. When the production arrived on Broadway in 1990, it won Galati Tony Awards for Best Play and for Best Direction. The adaptation most people will know of Steinbeck’s novel is the classic 1940 film by John Ford. Great though the film is, it diverges from the novel in downplaying the political implications of the story and in stopping the action before Steinbeck’s original controversial ending to arrive at a more hopeful conclusion. Galati does none of this and for that reason his adaptation is all more powerful.
Galati’s adaptation like the novel follows the plight of the Joad family who are victims both of the Great Depression of the 1930s and of the droughts that made Oklahoma a “dustbowl”. Having lost their house and land to a failed bank, they cling to the hope offered in handbills that there are jobs and even land to be had in the Golden State of California. The extended family of twelve plus a former preacher set out to make the 1500-mile journey towards a better life. The play, like the book, unflinchingly details how this journey of hope gradually becomes a journey into despair. It is no accident that the name Joad is so similar to the “Job” of the Old Testament since the the Joad family’s journey becomes a series of tests of how much misfortune a family can endure and still not lose its faith. Unlike the Bible, the faith that is tested is not the Joad’s belief in God but rather in humanity as they endure increasingly worse examples of deceit, abuse and exploitation. As the Joad family breaks up and their hopes become pared down to those of merely surviving, Ma Joad finds solace that they are part of something greater than themselves: “We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever ... cos we're the people”.
Although there are 58 speaking parts played by and a cast of 30, our focus remains on four central figures--Ma Joad, her son Tom and daughter Rose of Sharon and the former preacher Jim Casy. While Ma Joad and Casy are involved in the action, they main function is to put it in context based on their very different life experiences. We watch both Tom and Rose as they move from spiritual innocence to maturity, with Tom eventually sharing the a knowledge like Casy’s and Rose becoming, in a symbolic and heart-breaking way, a mother.
Evan Buliung, Tom McCamus and Chilina Kennedy all give outstanding performances. Buliung is so completely immerse in the the role of Tom, you believe he is the character not playing it. Tom’s not a thinker and not articulate, but Buliung shows us how, rather than strike out which is his nature, he tries to control himself and to formulate as best he can what it is that is going wrong in the world around him. As Casy, Tom McCamus is Tom’s opposite--both a thinker and articulate--yet all his thinking and speechifying has only led him to a negative world view where there are no morals but merely “stuff people do”. McCamus communicates Casy’s self-mocking pronouncements to perfection. Yet he suggests that beneath it all Casy does have strong moral compass as the action later shows when Casy lives up to his initials and becomes a kind of Christ figure.
Everyone knows that Chilina Kennedy is a fine comedienne, but as Rose of Sharon she shows that devastating drama is also with her range as one by one Rose’s illusions of her future collapse before her eyes. It pains me to to say so, but the single weak link in the entire cast is Janet Wright as Ma Joad. She rouses herself at the very start for the emotional homecoming when Tom returns after four years in prison. But after that she remains almost inert and expressionless despite being given some of the most significant speeches in the play. Her energy level is so far below all those around her, you wonder whether it is due to fatigue or illness, or whether acting so long for a television camera has made her forget how to project emotion across the proscenium to a live audience. If Jane Darwell in the film is your ideal embodiment of Ma Joad, you will be very disappointed. By delivering all her lines with the same intonation, whether speaking of buckets or people, she seems too weak to be the emotional and idealogical rock on which the Joad family is founded.
The excellent performances of the rest of the cast are far too numerous to mention but some standouts include Ian D. Clark as the wayward but secretly fearful Grampa Joad; Paul Nolan as the light-hearted, womanizing Al Joad; Randy Hughson as Tom’s Uncle John, gnawed away from inside by guilt; and Steve Ross as the simple Noah Joad who finally decides what he wants in life. Of the actors cast in multiple roles Peter Hutt gives a frightening real portrayal of craziness as Muley Graves, while Robert King gives what may be his best ever performance as the Man Going Back, someone who has been to California and is returning completely shattered by the experience. Chick Reid perfectly captures the annoying nature of Christian busybody Elizabeth Sandry. Tyrone Savage is riveting as Floyd Knowles, who tries to explain to Tom the urgency in forming unions to protect workers from unscrupulous employers. And Dylan Trowbridge shines in an incredibly wide range of roles from a singing car sales to a dying man in a barn.
Contrary to Stratford’s proclivity for overproduction, The Grapes of Wrath is stripped down to a bare stage and only those elements needed to tell the story. In keeping with the Brechtian aesthetic of making the audience aware that it is watching a play, John Arnone’s partial building fronts and sides are moved in in full view of the audience. The most detailed element is the Joad’s full-scale pickup truck which has been beautifully weathered to look like the old wreck it is supposed to be. Carolyn M. Smith’s costumes do not look like costumes at all but the kind of ragged, soiled clothing poor people of the 1930s actually would wear. Given the often empty stage, Steven Hawkins‘ lighting is essential in creating atmosphere and all sorts of effect from dawns and dusks to storms and fires. A manhunt staged with flashlights alone as a light source is thrilling.
Antoni Cimolino does his best work yet as a director in shaping the action of the epic story. He skillfully shifts focus from one group of speakers to the next among massed actors on stage, and the idyllic bathing scene of Act 1 and the contrasting flood of Act 2 are both masterfully staged. Most important, however, is that Cimolino does nothing to sentimentalize the story but find power in its very bleakness. As in Brecht, the various episodes of the tale are punctuated by song, in this case country and folk music from the talented trio of Andrew Penner, George Meanwell and Anna Atkinson, who play both fiddle and musical saw.
This is the first must-see show at Stratford this season and one hopes, given Cimolino’s position at the Festival, a declaration of a new seriousness at its programming. Some may attend Stratford for the fun of escapism, but there must be a place for plays like this which, though set in the 1930s, uncannily reflect the concerns of today, in this case, flaws in capitalism, union busting and the duty of society to the less fortunate. A glossy spectacle may please you while you’re in the theatre, but a hard-hitting, beautifully judged production like this will stay with you long after the curtain falls.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Tom McCamus and Evan Buliung with Janet Wright in background. ©2011 David Hou.
For Tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2011-06-02
The Grapes of Wrath