Randall Arney fondly remembers watching Mel Brooks` classic film comedy,
”The Producers,” particularly the opening-night scene in which shady, down-and-out producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) prepares to watch what he expects to be the fruits of the ”creative accounting” scam that hinges on his play`s being a ”sure-fire flop.”
”I told our actors, ”`Springtime for Hitler”` played at the Cort. They had a hit, and they weren`t even trying.”`
Randall Arney is the artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and his actors are the cast members of ”The Grapes of Wrath,” which Steppenwolf has taken to Broadway-and the venerable Cort Theatre-with opening night set for Thursday.
Based on John Steinbeck`s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel about the trek of Dust Bowl-devastated ”Okies” to the migrant labor camps of California, the play may be new to Manhattan, but Steppenwolf is not. Previous transplanted-from-the-Heartland productions were ”True West,” ”Balm in Gilead,” ”Orphans,” ”And a Nightingale Sang,” ”The Caretaker” and
”Educating Rita.”
Still, ”The Grapes of Wrath” is Steppenwolf`s first real Broadway show. ” `The Caretaker` was mounted at Circle in the Square, which is technically a Broadway theater,” says Arney. ”However, they have a subscription season, and so we had a limited run. This will be our first foray into an open-ended, independently produced situation.”
The progression from North Halsted Street to West 48th Street has been a long and complex one, marked by indecision, skepticism, up-and-down reviews, faulty plumbing and a wild-card fire alarm. The seed was planted on a college campus, and the seed money was acquired half a dozen years later.
A year and a half ago, ”The Grapes of Wrath” was a work in progress. Next, it was tightened and polished in California and England. Now, after more than a week of previews, it will be playing in the theater world`s equivalent of baseball`s ”bigs.”
”From the beginning, it was always in our minds to take it to New York,” Steppenwolf actor Gary Sinise says, adding with a laugh, ”At least, it was in my mind. You just don`t waste your time running it for only six weeks in Chicago, without taking it the whole hog.”
Adapter/director Frank Galati disagrees. ”Broadway is always a fantasy with anything that`s new. But truly, it was just a fantasy-a possibility that was very remote. Even when the London production scored as it did, there were still huge questions about whether it was even feasible to do the show in New York since the costs are astronomical. From the beginning, potential producers said, `This is insane. Nobody would ever do this on Broadway.”`
The $1.5 million-plus production-a presentation of the Shubert Organization, Steppenwolf and Suntory International Corp.-is a reworking of Steppenwolf`s biggest, costliest ($500,000) effort, one that opened here at the Royal-George Theatre in September of 1988. The 35-member cast-featuring Sinise as bitterly rebellious Tom Joad, Terry Kinney as preacher-turned-labor- organizer Jim Casy and Lois Smith as saintly Ma Joad-will remain the same, with only one performer in a major part not making the trip. (Alan Wilder, who played Muley, will stay behind to continue in Steppenwolf`s current production, ”Reckless.”)
The genesis of the trip began almost a decade ago when Galati, who teaches the study of fiction through performance at Northwestern, envisioned adapting the novel as a serial production at the university over three nights. He applied for the rights, and was strongly discouraged.
”Then, in the fall of 1985, Gary Sinise invited me to be a member of the ensemble and asked if there was anything I`d like to do,” says Galati. ”`The Grapes of Wrath` had hit me in the gut when I read it in high school. In a way, I don`t think I would be involved with literature or theater today if it hadn`t been for that novel.”
In 1987, Sinise resigned his position as Steppenwolf`s creative director in order to direct movies, and was succeeded by Arney. Sinise was originally slated to direct ”Grapes,” but his first film, ”Miles from Home,” was running over schedule, so Galati stepped in, with Sinise later coming aboard to play the pivotal role of Tom.
”We wrote to the Steinbeck estate and found there was interest,” says Steppenwolf managing director Stephen Eich. ”We worked with their lawyers for three months, and signed an agreement. We got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and $25,000 from AT&T to develop the script. Years passed. In the fall of `87, we finally made the decision to do the production the next fall. We went after a corporate sponsor, and secured $100,000 more from AT&T.”
”John had never really considered letting anyone do it on the stage,”
says Steinbeck`s widow, Elaine. ”I don`t think he thought of it as particularly visual, although he loved the movie. After John died and I inherited the copyright, I never was tempted to grant the rights until Steppenwolf asked. I`d seen their work in London and New York and I knew how good they were. I haven`t been sorry for one single second. And they did just right in taking their own actors to New York. I think if someone suddenly imports a star, it`s wicked.
”I was very moved and pleased by the show when I saw it in Chicago, and later in London, where John`s book is very well known. In fact, it`s well known all over the world. In Yokohama three or four years ago, I walked into a bookstore and said, `Do you have any books by the American writer, John Steinbeck?` You could sort of see the translating part of the salesman`s brain begin to turn, and he said, `Oh, yes, we have ”The Angry Raisins.””`
The Steppenwolf production is the first sanctioned for worldwide production, but there were previous stage productions that weren`t
particularly successful-one at the 1982 New American Plays Festival of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the other a limited run at the Edinburgh Festival in the late `80s.
There also was, of course, John Ford`s 1940 film that starred Henry Fonda, John Carradine and Jane Darwell. ”I think it`s a breathtaking achievement of economy and power, and Gregg Toland`s cinematography and the whole tone is absolutely stunning,” says Galati, who got hold of a copy of the Nunnally Johnson screenplay. ”There are some significant problems. Hollywood could not accept the ending of a young girl (Rose of Sharon) giving her breast to a starving stranger. Also, the proportioning of attention to principal characters is tipped oddly. It`s clearly Tom`s story in the movie, while the novel is also Ma`s story and the dismantling of a family.”
Before rehearsals began in Chicago in the summer of `88, Galati had been working on the script on and off for a year and a half. When the previews opened, the production went on interminably. ”I think our longest night was four hours and 20 minutes,” the director/playwright says. ”After our first preview, I went home and stayed up all the next night and made cuts on 52 pages. Some characters were completely eliminated. We called it the Thursday Night Massacre.”
When the show opened, the running time was about 2 hours and 50 minutes. It played for six weeks, and the notices were mixed. The Tribune`s Richard Christiansen wrote that for most of the time, ”the production simply slogs along,” and that it ”has amazingly little to offer in strong performances.” Hedy Weiss of the Sun-Times called it ”breathtaking,” ”emotionally wrenching” and ”triumphant.”
Fortuitously, in May of `88, Eich had written a letter to Britain`s National Theatre on a whim, and it was passed on to Thelma Holt, who runs the National`s biennial International Theatre Season. ”She really liked the Chicago production,” says Eich, who proceeded to help raise about $150,000 to take the vehicle to London for a limited run.
It also was decided that the show should first play once more in the United States. ”We hooked up with the La Jolla Playhouse, which seemed very interested in new work,” says Arney. ”California was particularly intriguing to us because of the Joads` journey-the fact that we might be playing, two generations later, to the very people whom the story was about.”
”I started making changes,” Galati says. ”Perhaps they weren`t big changes, but for us they were big things. Cutting out whole musical sequences, for instance, and shortening characters and compressing scenes.”
”Frank`s attempt in Chicago to alternate scenes with Michael Smith`s songs had been true to the novel, and yet it had never been our desire to create something Brechtian,” adds Arney. ”Our goal was never to release the audience emotionally, but keep them in the game. So we looked a great deal at the musical transitions in our remount. The biggest work by far was getting from scene to scene, rather than on the scene work itself. Also, the size of the cast dropped by six performers from 41 to 35.”
”Ninety percent of the set that will be in New York was the La Jolla/
London set,” says Kevin Rigdon, who designed the set and lighting. ”The scale has changed on a lot of things, merely because the stage is bigger. Because it`s a Broadway production, there are more funds available, so the water system for making it rain on stage is now electronically run, and is more precise.
”There`s a major misconception that the stagehands in New York are a bunch of boneheads who are trying to screw you for every nickle. I certainly haven`t experienced it, and this is my sixth or seventh Broadway show. Sure, there are some around. Just don`t hire them. I`ve been very fortunate to get the production staff that I wanted. Our production carpenter, for instance, supervised `Cats.` Our production property man left `Gypsy` to do this. You hear about a lot of people who want to be on this one, and this is not the sort of show where you can slough off and sit backstage and play poker. You`re humping through three hours.”
The production in La Jolla ran for six weeks in the spring of `89 to generally upbeat reviews. It closed on a Saturday night, and the actors flew to London the next day. The sold-out run, limited to 12 performances, opened on Thursday night at the National`s Lyttelton Theatre to reviews that were, for the most part, laudatory.
Galati says there will be some changes, but not major ones, between the La Jolla/London and Broadway productions. ”There are some things I`d like to adjust, refocus, try to make a little clearer. But we just don`t have all that much time. It`s frighteningly short.”
”The Shubert organization, at my beckoning, saw the show in La Jolla,”
says Eich. ”They just weren`t interested in seeing it in Chicago. Maybe they thought that the idea of doing a Depression-era show with 41 people just wasn`t going to do it. But coupled with what they saw in La Jolla and the West Coast reviews, and then the reviews and the word that was coming out of London, they developed an interest. As soon as we got back from London last summer, we started putting together the Broadway deal.
”It`s excited me that even this mega-million organization hasn`t lost sight of being able to take this show and its delicate nature and make it transfer intact. Never once did they come to us and say, `It`s great for you guys to have this big cast, but chop it in half and make sure all the people come from New York.` There was a total respect for the Steppenwolf`s artistic philosophy.”
There have been the usual obstacles on the road to the Great White Way. During a Chicago curtain call, it ”rained” on stage. A fire alarm in an adjacent London theater started making foghorn noises.
”There are plays that fight you every inch of the way, and this is one of them,” says Eich. ”But we have gotten the thing to New York. Way back, we didn`t know how. One of our ideas was that if we couldn`t get a major producer to bite on it, we would go after the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center, and once it hit, maybe take it to Broadway. But after the Shuberts came on board, there was no need for that. I know they`re selling tickets through Sept. 2. Whether or not it runs that long remains to be seen.”
Particularly when it costs more than $200,000 a week.
A big factor, of course, will be the reaction of The New York Times`
theater critic, Frank Rich, who gave the Chicago production a generally positive review.
”What he saw in Chicago was a work in progress at a not-for-profit regional theater,” says Sinise. ”When you go into Broadway, the stakes are quite different. Now, it`s a for-profit, commercial business. It`s a whole new ballgame.”
