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Stage Review: Starlight production tightens the focus of 'Grapes of Wrath'
Friday, February 18, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
If your family has lived in this town for more than a generation, you've already met the Joads. Honest within reason, hardworking to a fault, financially broke and beaten to hell and back by government, financial institutions and corporate entities. They're not pretty people, they don't always dress well and they wonder what they've done to deserve the way they're treated.
John Steinbeck ran into them a while back -- wrote a book about them. He called it "The Grapes of Wrath."
Starlight Productions' spin on the award-winning Frank Galati adaptation holds truer to the novel than John Ford's 1940 film. With a cast of dozens, "Grapes" could have become complicated and unwieldy. Instead, director Scott Lee DeNier makes an epic story about an Okie family's trek to California seem up close and personal, weaving live acoustic music through the fabric of the show to boost its authenticity.
Following Galati's lead, DeNier plays to the strengths of the stage medium by enhancing the intimacy with clever blocking and lighting. A low ramp separates the broad Foster Memorial stage into three depths allowing the action to move increasingly closer to the audience. Campfires glow through trap doors, sets drop in from above and when the family needs wheels to get them to the California orange fields, they build a jalopy from the set pieces surrounding them.
Darren Eliker, who played Starlight's Biff in "Death of a Salesman," turns Tom Joad's lesson in labor-management relations into a spiritual quest. Eliker is likable as a humble, recently paroled family man in the first act. In the second, he slowly becomes a working-class hero, convincing even the most stalwart company man to vote union.
Never one to shy away from a searing dramatic role, Sheridan Crist resurrects the spirit of Steinbeck's philosophical former preacher. With Crist's patience and gift for timing, his character quickly becomes the play's moral compass, enabling the story to transcend a level of blue-collar drama and feel like something more. He works particularly well with Eliker and has a scathing dramatic moment in Act 2 that leaves the audience breathless.
Terry Wickline carries much of the dramatic load as Ma Joad, the family matriarch whose strength and stubbornness personify the unseen momentum driving the journey. Her husband is played convincingly by Americus Rocco. In a heartfelt moment that requires tremendous sensitivity, Megan MacKenzie Lawrence's self-centered and naive Rose of Sharon suddenly grows into Steinbeck's resonating symbol of humanism.
Standout performances abound including Justin G. Krauss as randy Al Joad, Dereck Walton as a fellow Okie, Arlene Merryman as a fundamentalist firebrand and Nancy Mimless in several roles. Ted and Betty Brunetti rehearsed their entire married lives for their fine roles as cantankerous Grandma and Grandpa Joad, and Seth Carpenter is chilling as an emotionally exhausted Okie who's been chewed up and spit out by the California work camps.
Tom Cunningham, D.C. Fitzgerald and Paul Hannan provide more than musical accompaniment, performing on and off stage on fiddle, guitar, harmonica, upright bass, banjo and Jew's harp. The Woody Guthrie songs came with the script, but Cunningham and Fitzgerald wrote the atmospheric interludes that tie it all together.
It's ironic that Steinbeck's monument to the working class would be performed for the first time outside New York just across the street from the Carnegie Museum, a monument built by a notorious union-buster. Even in an age of white-collar technology "The Grapes of Wrath" is a Pittsburgh kind of show, filled with familiar faces and dripping with blue-collar sweat and blood.
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Where: Stephen Foster Memorial, adjacent to the Cathedral of Learning, Oakland.