1 of 2
Photo (c) Ken Howard, 2017, courtesy of Opera Theatre St. Louis
(Center) Tobias Greenhalgh as Tom Joad in Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
2 of 2
Photo (c) Ken Howard, 2017, courtesy of Opera Theatre of St. Louis
Nathaniel Mahone as The Boy in the Barn in Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
My guess is a good chunk of politically conscious American voters of the right and the left spent much of yesterday listening to, or watching, the news. The subject of the day, managing to swamp Russia, Kushner, Comey, and Spicer, was the Paris Climate Change Accord. The broadcast frenzy concerned a question of whether President Trump would withdraw this country from the Accord.
No answers came during the day or the evening, and leaving it all behind, we took off for the Loretto-Hilton Center to see and to hear Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s production of The Grapes of Wrath, a music drama by the composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie.
Gordon’s and Korie’s work is based, of course, on the Depression-era novel by John Steinbeck. The novel, pigeonholed as “realist,” is also an effulgence of myth and metaphor; a vessel of social pathology; and a thorny rose garden of the unconscious, where the visitor is wise to pick her flowers carefully.
Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel in 1940, and that distinction was a landmark on the writer’s way to Stockholm. There he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 from King Gustav VI Adolf.
The production at the Loretto-Hilton this spring is a new performing edition of the opera. Opera Theatre is presenting its American debut here, and St. Louis is fortunate to have it. In all aspects, from the skillful interpretation of the score by conductor Christopher Allen and the artists of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to the singing by cast and chorus, it is outstanding and troubling—a tale sung for our time as well as the Depression. Cast members are fresh-faced and voiced; their singing is haunting, as it should be. The set is as good as any I have ever seen on the stage of this opera house. Dust blows; rain falls; lightning crashes. The lighting and the décor enhance the adaptable set with expressive clarity.
In mounting a pointed, no-holds-barred show such as this one, the company, under the leadership of Timothy O’Leary, is strengthening a tradition of speaking truth to a diverse audience, some members of it are powerful, others not so. Opera Theatre maintains for that audience a tradition of risk-taking investments in musical works of art. These operas examine pressing and often searing subjects with seriousness and purpose. In concerts and special events, it addresses community and moral issues and crises such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.
Last night (Wednesday, May 31), no more than ten bars after the downbeat, one realized the connection between the embarrassing commotion of White House foot-dragging and tweeting and the weary eloquence of the ravaged prairie landscape of the Gordon-Korie opera.
First and most obvious is the Damoclesean sword of climate and climate change. In the Great Depression, human mismanagement of the land and naturally formed drought conditions in the late ’30s brought on ferocious dust storms. The storms not only ravaged the land, but also a human population of poor dirt farmers and their communities.
The storms blackened the skies of Oklahoma and their dust invaded houses and barns and businesses just as effectively as bituminous coal burning in the 1930s did in St. Louis. On Nov. 28, 1939, coal smoke was so thick the day became known as “the day the sun didn’t shine”; streetlamps, however, shown at noon in St. Louis.
To understand these disasters of social and environmental desolation and their kinship to a poorly educated or intellectually stubborn slice of deniers in contemporary America, one must be willing to understand that genuine suffering is spread across our land afflicting a huge population of poor people, and must be ready to empathize with it and work to alleviate it. As for those who deny science, accepting the truth is difficult, especially where investments of time and capital are concerned.
Of course, demagoguery can smell power in poverty from miles away, and besides hoodwinking men and women in strapped circumstances, demagogues also go after academics and progressives and characterize and caricature them as The Enemy—pointy-heads sounding false alarms. This enemy is promising doom, and the way to deal with doom is to withdraw from the Paris Accord.
A similar mentality of doom and denial washed through communities of farmers being displaced by big banks and rapacious landowners in the 1930s. Poverty is measured by degree. It was far worse in the Depression than now, but that is relative and of no succor to the poor and struggling. No public safety nets were stretched under slippery financial tightropes, where brothers and sisters fought their siblings in disagreements over unions and suspected pinko or communist leanings and the simple and constant abrasions of hunger and fear. The kindness of strangers—or the selfishness of them—obtained in measurable degrees.
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was a sweeping, heartbreaking cautionary tale that in its frank, take-no-prisoners language, making common cause without fear on the side of the poor. He also had a vivid understanding of tendencies for people living in poverty to turn on one another as well as on The Man, or the union or the government or on the disabled such as the prescient Noah, a literary cousin of Faulkner’s Benjy Compson.
The story centers on and revolves around and travels west with the proud but poverty-stricken Joad family, who are forced off their Oklahoma farm and driven out of their house by the arrival of a demolition team, sent by the owners of the property.
The demolition guys are, in turn, in hock to the bank—the branch of the big bank in Chicago. Steinbeck builds from the wretched, eroded ground up to establish the layers of class and the manifestations of oppression and resistance that result. Nobody wins really, not even Chicago.
The Joads manage to scrape together enough money for a beat-up truck, and oblivious to the dangers of the journey and the perils of their destination, California, they strike out. The journey and their lives in Hoovervilles and encounters with cops and union thugs and landowners and strikebreakers are wretched. Despite Mrs. Joad’s insistence on family solidarity, the situations get worse, more desperate, more dangerously jagged. There is no happy ending, only a finale filled with nourishing grace of the most fundamental sort, and irony as sharp as a switchblade.
The Grapes of Wrath has been put under the microscopes of symbolism and religious mythology—the lapsarian evangelist Jim Casy’s initials are thought to give him a Christlike presence; perhaps. Goodness comes in his reluctant eulogy for Granma, and his words speak an innocence teased out of recklessness, and are poetic indeed.
Michael Korie’s libretto is sustained free verse, a treatment of the American vernacular, as sensitive and authentic as I’ve ever heard outside my native American South. Ricky Gordon’s music is an Ozark stream in the springtime, full of energy, muddy here, turbulent there, calm and sweet in crystalline pools that refresh the soul, but dangerous and deadly on the loose.
Fitted with virtuosity to the words of Steinbeck and his characters he created, and in a partnership with their often-balletic movement, the music takes on the shudders of melancholy and dread. It is synchronous, affectingly lyrical and, in the rich context of relationships with Thomson and Copland, an exultation of an indigenous and thoroughly American art. Through the course of the evening, it spills from stage and pit and attaches itself to a listener’s spirit. It is revealed to be, in the end, affectingly noble.
Nowadays, for operas, and really for any legitimate work of Art with a capital A, the industry of those who create it can no longer be a form simply to entertain us, and make us laugh, or cry, and to produce tunes one can whistle and hum while strolling into the darkness.
Art that aspires to greatness must take us places we might never know otherwise, and avoid the hummable tunes, and drag us where we do not want to go—into the middle of situations that reveal, yes, joy, but suffering too, and deadly, deadly transfigurations. Once we have gone beyond boundaries and swim in the beauty and magnificence and pain and suffering, we are invited to gain knowledge well beyond the superficial. Art is not about Beauty so much it is, as Ma Joad sings, about Us.
We are provided the opportunity to absorb a realization, as did the Joads, that the idealized all-things-bright-and-beautiful California, for most of the refugees from the dust, was a myth.
Transposing that sort of experience to our time, when we look at the melting Antarctic, knowledge is available. We can visit firsthand the horror of its melting, and obtain an understanding drenched in science and free of political cant.
In the frisson of such magnificence as The Grapes of Wrath, it is sad to say, gentle readers, that it appears in 2017 we in the same rutted, misbegotten track, and only hard work and risk and sacrifice can save us.
But we cannot forget the power and the majesty of art as a sustaining force and as a source of hope and optimism. The Grapes of Wrath, on the page and as music in the air, is a harbinger of possibilities such as those, and as art so often does, revelations strike forcefully and come from sources we can only imagine.
Mine arrived as would a spectre at the end of the show, delivered ethereally in bearing and voice by a young member of the company, a fellow called Nathaniel Mahone.
Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ production of The Grapes of Wrath runs through June 25. Performances are at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Arts, 130 Edgar. For performance dates and times, or to buy tickets, visit opera-stl.org.
