Willie Nelson wrote, "On the road again, / I just can't wait to get on the road again," but "Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's epic 1939 novel of the Joad family's desperate flight to California during the Great Depression, illuminates the dark underside of America's westering urge.
The task for David Runzo, who directs the current Blackfriars Theatre production of Frank Galati's 1990 Tony-winning adaptation of the novel, is to dramatize the Joad's archetypal struggle to survive. It plays out against the barren landscape of the Southwest, and the tempting orchards but unwelcoming people of California. Despite his skill and experience, the production often lacks what E.E. Cummings called "that precision which creates movement."
Tom Joad returns home on parole after four years to find his family driven off its small Oklahoma farm. Like hundreds of thousands of other "Okies," they climb into a rattletrap truck to find a new life in California. The violent prejudice they encounter tests their capacity to survive individually and as a family.
Because Steinbeck's work is so large, the stage version must be episodic and highly selective. Some scenes so pare down what happens in the novel that they barely register; someone who hasn't read Steinbeck must wonder what several incidents are about. It's the kind of theater piece that takes great skill to propel because the momentum slows and the connections blur too easily.
In this production, an unfocused climactic scene that drives Tom away from the rest of the family feels not much more important than an overnight stop by a river to rest, and the consistently stilted line readings diminish the dramatic effect. Yet John Haldoupis' stage set of adaptable modules and a large wheel that glides one scene into the next helps to hold the ever-shifting scenes together.
No stage production can portray the vast emptiness of Texas and New Mexico, but it must be able to dramatize the Joads' elemental need to find work and, in Ma Joad's words, "keep the family goin'." Yet aside from the play's last 20 minutes, the production falls short. Ma and her son Tom stand at the play's emotional and dramatic center, but while Vicki Casarett's Ma is loving, her performance lacks the authority that holds a family together. Only near the end, when Tom must flee to save himself after a violent incident, and his pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon, delivers her baby, does Ma's strength appear with full force. The play's final image of Rose of Sharon's giving her milk to keep an ailing man alive possesses the emotional power that we've spent two hours waiting for.
At the same time, Carl D. Krickmire's stiff portrayal of Tom rarely goes deeper than a hot temper and a struggle to hold his rage in check. H. Darrell Lance plays Pa Joad as an ordinary man whose spirit abides despite adversity, and Rebecca Herber as a previously underplayed Rose of Sharon grows into womanhood in a moving final scene that includes brief partial nudity. The moment is in no way salacious.
When a play's heart is left even partly empty, there may be another character who can fill it. In this case, Peter J. Doyle brings a gift for dialect, humor, and insight to former preacher Jim Casy (whose initials are no accident). In the novel, Casy is little more than a symbol on legs, whose task is to articulate Steinbeck's political and spiritual themes. He comes to believe that we are all part of one great universal soul so, in what appears to us to be the naïve optimism of the 1930's, ordinary people need to organize. Doyle makes Casy likable, honorable, and open-hearted, a man driven to speak for those who have no voice in a production where, despite Runzo's sympathetic direction, an insufficiently skilled cast cannot lift its own voices high enough.
"The Grapes of Wrath"
Through October 27
Blackfriars Theatre, 82 Lawn St.
$15-$25 | 454-1260 | blackfriars.org