The Grapes of Wrath
The Joads in the Intiman Theatre production of The Grapes of Wrath
Photo by Laura Morton, Seattle Times
John Steinbeck's story of the Joad family's journey to California at the height of the America's Great Depression continues to speak. Last night, watching the Intiman Theatre's latest production of The Grapes of Wrath, the second installment of its multi-year "American Cycle", I couldn't help but think of the millions of displaced people currently on the move across the planet. Normally such displacement happens elsewhere, and we are accustomed to seeing new reports and images detailing third world migrations. But the play at Intiman especially resonates given the recent tragedies of Katrina and Rita, which help frame our response to the earthquake in India and Pakistan.
It is with some hanging of the head that I confess I've never read Steinbeck's classic, nor have I seen the classic film with Henry Fonda. So my first encounter with the Joads was in a videotaped presentation of Steppenwolf Theatre's award-winning production of this play, with Gary Sinise in the role of Tom. I was transfixed and moved, and at the end of the play, I was absolutely shattered by the final image, which, I suppose, I should not reveal, fearing to spoil the experience for others. But be warned, I have to talk about it.
Women are powerful creatures, strong to the point of death, and Ma Joad (beautifully played in the Intiman production by Beth Dixon) carries the Joad family across the mountains and desert on her emotional back, withstanding blow after blow, loss after loss, vowing repeatedly to simply "go on." The men of the play may do the leading and the fighting and the heavy lifting, but it's the women who provide the ground on which these men walk, the food of their lives. Ma Joad literally sits with death, craddling Grandma in the back of the truck as they finally cross down out of the mountains to gain their first view of the great valleys of California at the end of Act One.
I knew these kind of southern women, these powerful women who lived up through the depression and hung on as best they could. Ma and Pa Joad could have easily been my grandparents on my mother's side, Pawpaw and Maamaw we called them. Pawpaw was a fighter, a grizzled old soul with a heart that had a hard time making itself known, a complex sort of man who, now looking back, completely confounded me. But he was one of the ones wandering around, trying, in the 30's, to piece together a life of sharecropping and whatever hard labor he could find. And Maamaw was a quieter version of Ma Joad, not dominant in the same way, but with an undercurrent of presence that spoke of hard times lived through. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but I think not, because the truth is--and here is not the place to belabor this--our relationships, at least in my mind, were difficult. But I think this is one of the reasons I love this play so much[sigma]it reminds me of my family, and the potential, in spite of our losses, to grow on.
And to the final devastating image of the play: the young Rose of Sharon, after having traveled 2000 miles to end up in a boxcar in a driving rainstorm, a nearby river threatening to overrun its banks even as she is going into labor, now abandoned by her husband, having just given birth to a stillborn child, manages to limp into a barn on higher ground (at the prompting and goading of Ma Joad), and there, having found a man on the brink of starvation, offers the milk of her own breast to keep this man from death. On the deep stage of the Intiman, with the sounds of trickling rain beating on the stage, the image of the wracked woman offering her life's milk to the weak and dying man is almost more than the heart can bear. It is an image that captures the play: the devastating results of man's inhumanity to man, as well as the core strength of a human being to dig into the unknown source of the soul (unknown in Steinbeck's world, at least) to offer its very self.
Woman and Man, tied together in a primal image of God, who has poured just such hope and love into our hearts...
This is life...
9:02:24 AM 
