Stage:

...I can't re-create that on stage...

...Here, even though scenes are played in the river and at the campfire, the machinery has its own statement to make...

...For me, the language of the book is central and the spectacle secondary...

...GERALD WEALES Mole: Mac Wellman's Crowbar, reviewed in the April 6 Commonweal and originally slated for a short run, has now been scheduled for an extended engagement at the Victory Theatre.y Theatre...

...They do not always mesh, but individual moments have great effect...

...Transferred from the novel to either medium, The Grapes of Wrath loses the larger sense of the migration West, the vast gathering of the disinherited, the sense of history in the making that Steinbeck tried to get with the interstitial non-Joad chapters...

...He showed this primarily through its absence, through the sense of otherness that allowed men whose own existence was marginal to separate themselves from the primary victims, to label them Okies, see them as dirty and lazy, something less than human...

...Steinbeck was expressing a hope that human generosity would rescue these homeless and dispossessed people...

...The final scene of the play, like the final scene of the novel, shows Rose of Sharon, having lost her baby, baring her breast to feed a starving man...

...At one level, The Grapes of Wrath is about making a play of Steinbeck's novel...

...The action takes place on an almost empty stage...

...Galati uses Tom's speech, too, and Ma's famous speech ("We're the people we go on") which was plucked from the interior of the novel to give a powerful populist final note to the film...

...What was needed was a recognition of oneself within those the system has discarded...

...These largely disappear in both the film and the play, although Galati keeps the section on the used-car sharks by turning it into a musical number...

...The focus throughout is on the family...

...Nunnally Johnson's screenplay, like Galati's adaptation, takes most of the speeches directly from Steinbeck...

...Similarly, the realistic truck that carries the Joads and their belongings is manipulated so that it always seems to be moving into a scene, a playing area, and not to the West...

...On another, it is the story of the Joads...

...For Steinbeck, there are two main political statements the way the big farmers (the capitalists) profit by the misery of others, and the need to organize to fight them...

...These elements are both in the play, but there is another point shown in the novel primarily through dialogue that explains the particular relevance of the work today...

...Galati has chosen to dramatize the predictable scenes the departure, the burial of Grampa, the revelation of Granma's death, the first glimpse of California, the fight in the Hooverville, the dance in the government camp, the killing of the preacher and Tom's retaliation, Tom's flight, the flood at the end...

...Since she was the most self-preoccupied of all the Joads, her act, for Steinbeck, was an image of the movement from the individual to the community which exists in the novel primarily in the words of Casey and Tom's farewell speech to his mother...

...With no close-up camera to underline the emotional force of his scenes, Galati depends on the Steppenwolf company's ensemble playing which surrounds and emphasizes the very strong individual performances particularly those of Lois Smith and Robert Breuler as Ma and Pa Joad, Gary Sinise as Tom, Terry Kinney as Jim Casey, the preacher...

...Galati's comment on language is somewhat misleading insofar as it separates the play from the film...

...Commenting on John Ford's 1940 film version of the novel, Galati told a New York Times interviewer (March 18, 1990), "Ford brought a rich visual poetry to the story...

...If Marianne Moore will forgive me, these are real Joads in imaginary gardens...

...It is true that he cannot approximate Gregg Toland's photography Henry Fonda's Tom Joad moving distantly across the landscape, the Joads silhouetted against the sky above a devastated farm but spectacle is not quite as unimportant as the quotation suggests...

...props are minimal and when the stage floor opens to provide a river with real water or a fire to cook the sidemeat there is no hint of verisimilitude...

...Insofar as the play embodies that attitude, which it does to some extent, it speaks to us as we use otherness to steel ourselves when we step around people sleeping on the streets and in stations, when we quicken our steps and lower our eyes not to see the beggar holding out his or her cup...

...When the trap becomes a grave for Ophelia in a production of Hamlet, it is a device that can be forgotten if the gravedigger and the Hamlet are skillful enough...

...The work as a whole is one of the most impressive pieces on the New York stage, an unusual work to see on Broadway these days...

...The film used some of the best character actors in Hollywood, most of them playing the choicest roles of their careers Jane Darwell, John Carradine, John Qualen, Russell Simpson and Toland's camera marvelous-ly filled the screen with their faces...

...Galati moves it back to its original position and Lois Smith reads it almost as a throwaway, demoting Ma from symbol to character again...

...A creation of Steppenwolf, using both company members and outsiders signed on for the occasion, it has come to New York by way of Chicago, California, and London...

...Perhaps, but for Steinbeck individual generosity was not enough...

...Looking down on the stage from the mezzanine where I sat which may be the best place from which to view the work one sees patterns of movement which may have thematic point (individuals becoming a group and then pulling apart again) but which seem more important as theatrical moments...

...yet, I doubt that the venom in the sequence would be obvious to anyone who did not know the Steinbeck original...

...Unable to emulate Ford and Toland's conscious art of photography to suggest real life, Galati has embraced the mechanics of his staging...

...STAGE VINTAGE PRODUCTION GALATI'S 'GRAPES OF WRATH' The Grapes of Wrath, Frank Galati's adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel, is three shows in one: a theatrical piece, a gathering of naturalistic vignettes, and, implicitly at least, an ideational statement...

...It tells us that buried in our success is a deep failure," Galati said in the Times...