My wife and I went to see The Grapes of Wrath at the Intiman Theatre on Thursday. We were mildly disappointed. My wife was tired after work today, so I went to the related Open Minds/Open Dialogue event alone tonight. I was doubly disappointed – so much so that I decided to start this blog to record why.
What ailed the play? Well, for starters: neither Act had a sense of an ending.
At the end of the first Act, the Joads crest the Sierras and see the promised land of California spread out before them. Yet the production didn’t convey a sense of the relief and excitement they must be feeling, after having overcome their trials so far. Instead, we felt oddly distant from them, as if we were disinterested witnesses to their history, not theatrical sharers in it. It took a minute of two for the audience to realize the Act was at an end.
At the end of the second Act, Rose of Sharon, immediately after losing her child in birth, bares her breast to feed a man in the barn the remaining Joads have taken shelter in, who has starved himself so long to feed his own young son that he can’t keep other food down. Hard to imagine a dramatic moment more freighted with symbolic significance – crossing Madonna and Child with the Pieta – yet in this production it falls flat. You mainly feel distracted by – and a little queasy at – the naturalistic aspects of the scene, not swept beyond them into a sense of the play’s broader significance. So you wait a minute or two for something more to happen, until you realize it never will – not tonight at any rate, not here.
And that’s the weakness of the Intiman’s production overall – it’s like a kind of historical shadow play, populated by doomed spectres with whom we fail to connect, sleepwalking their way through scenes that should feel a lot more emotionally charged and suggestive of a larger signficance than they ever do. Truly a pity – but alas, no Pieta. Not even close.
Don’t get me wrong: this production is worth seeing, the production values are fine, the performances accomplished. They just lack much in the way of passion or conviction – all except for the preacher, who had more than enough to highlight what was lacking in the other players. Probably a case of actor prevailing over director.
And so I decided over the next few days to attend the main “community” event presented in conjuction with this production, the second of the Intiman’s annual America Cycle of plays (oddly, in two cases novels adapted into plays) – whose five-year mission is to provide “a rare opportunity for INTIMAN audiences and our Puget Sound community to engage in a long-term conversation exploring, through art, civic dialogue and collaborative partnerships, what it means to be an American” – in hopes of finding a chance to voice my concerns.
I was also attracted by the bizarre conceit of this event: that the significance of The Grapes for Seattle today had something to do with the declining population of wild salmon returning every year to the Puget Sound area due to misguided farming practices – our own potential “dustbowl.” And to the panel discussing it, which included the archly entertaining writer Jonathan Raban – whose Waxwings I had enjoyed reading after moving to Seattle – and the literary theoretician cum alternative weekly reporter Charles Mudede, who writes a Stranger column I read every week, Police Beat – a kind of Barthes Mythologies drawn from the blotters of local crime. If anyone could see the absurdity of this salmon thesis – and have the cheek to violate decorum enough to have fun with it – I was sure these guys would.
Alas, as already said, I was doubly disappointed. Not in Raban – arch as ever, he brought Steinbeck’s friend Woody Guthrie and his songs celebrating Columbia River’s dams in conjunction with his young daughter, who couldn’t believe a certified leftist ever sang such tunes. Raban also opined that the Joads of today’s Puget Sound are the Eastside farmers protesting salmon protection regulations outside King County Executive Ron Sim’s Seattle office. Nor even in the other panelists, who typically stayed away from salmon and the play to address interesting concerns I unfortunately don’t have time to summarize here.
But I was disappointed in the Intiman and the moderator they selected, Mudede. “Open Minds/Open Dialogue,” the title of the event: wouldn’t that seem to imply a breaking down of the fourth wall that, more and more often it seems, confines the audience in mute isolation from active involvement in theatrical, political, indeed all managerially organized events? Yet there was Laura Penn at 7:40pm kicking things off by expressing how “grateful” the Intiman was that the “distinguished” personnages on the panel would gift us mere mortals in the audience with their presentations. And there was Mudede calling the proceedings to an abrupt end at 9pm – that’s all the time we have folks! – after only two audience members (out of only about 20 present not connected with the production) had been given the chance to ask a question – one of them being the chair of the Community Committe of local notables who had organized the thing. Soon afterwards, I witnessed Mudede hurrying away from the building trailed by a companion; he must have had another, more important obligation to attend to.
How, I could only wonder, does the leadership of the Intiman conceive of its “community” these days? As a collection of other people in corporate or non-profit leadership positions with whom they commune – and collect donations from – in private? What of the broad mass of their audience – does the Intiman care what they have to say? What would the Joads of today make of this?
That hothead Tom, at least, would have been pretty pissed off, and the preacher would have been unhappy he couldn’t have given a speech too. Particularly since the one actual audience question that got asked – “How do you reach people on the opposite side of your issues?” – received no good answer from the panel, who hemmed and hawed about having meetings with the leaders on the opposite side and trying to hammer things out.
No, that’s not the way to reach them, saith the preacher. Those in charge are mainly hypocrites, one way or another – those on the left more than those on the right: making good salaries and attending catered meetings while fighting on the side of the poor and the right.
How to reach the opposite side of the audience? That’s dirt simple: through songs like Woodie Guthrie’s, through novels like John Steinbeck’s and plays that adapt them, through works of deep imagination today that can catch their audience’s passion and convictions up in the webs of their creation, to mold them anew in its own image – and then let them go to work recreating the world they inhabit to conform to their newly enlarged understanding.
But about that kind of art, the Intiman and its American Cycle has – going by the evidence I saw – little inkling. And that’s a real pity.
Next time, how about a real Madonna and Child Pieta?
2 comments so far, add yours ▶
