My father was six during the drought that inspired The Grapes of Wrath, the same age as Winfield, Tom Joad's little brother. Like the Joads, my dad’s family grew up dirt poor. They were hungry in Oklahoma, he was hungry in an Italian-American ghetto in Waterbury, CT.
When Dad was a boy working in a store at the age of 10, Waterbury was already dying a post-industrial death, the mayor and 22 others went to jail on corruption charges that year. That was 1940; a year after the novel won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer.
The film was released that year.
The disease that was killing Waterbury—like the disease that turned America's farm country to dust and blew it away along with the livelihoods of millions of farm families—was unnamable. It still is. Calling it "greed" may have satisfied some but my father didn't think it was so simple that you could get the whole story into one word. My dad and Tom Joad never trusted “talkin'.” Dad hated the phrase The Great Depression. These three words elevate misery to greatness so that people who come later can tell morality tales about how to overcome insurmountable obstacles. The Grapes of Wrath, incidentally, isn't that kind of a story, and, because of that, I'm still interested in it. For me, the story lives.
In many ways I've been rehearsing the role of Tom for thirty years; that's more years than Tom is supposed to have been alive. I'm way too old for this and I'm not much of a romantic any more despite the tone of this post. I'm not waiting for the ghost of ol' Tom Joad, like Springsteen sings in that fantastic and sad song. It's hard to hope for better days in post-modern, neo-colonial America where the freedom to Frack is guaranteed but social security is perpetually on the long march to the gallows and people of certain gender, race, or economic status remain invisible. It's strange to play Tom at this point in my life.
Passionate speeches now all sound a bit false to me—especially when I give them, and when they promise a way to a better world for my son Django who is sharing the role of Winfield in this production. I look at him and I see my dad, who he never met, and I see Tom Joad too. I wonder what he sees when he watches this play. Someday he'll leave home to do whatever he does out in the world. Maybe he'll make passionate speeches. I want to tell him, don't trust heroes, gurus, preachers, or revolutionaries. I want to tell him to trust art, especially the art of theater. I'm still confident that there are things in this story (still waiting to be found) that, when played (or yelled) on a stage, can energize people in ways they don't expect and perhaps provide ways of thinking that nobody's yet thought of, ways of hearing things that we don't yet have ears to hear, and ways of seeing what we don't yet have eyes to see. I ‘m glad my son is here to see me play this role … I wish my dad were.
-- John Zibell (Tom Joad)
I grew up in the middle of a cornfield, southern Indiana, and got my B.S. in biology at Purdue University (boiler up!). I recently moved to California, lost my redneck accent, yet still refuse to use the word, hella, in my everyday speech.
My love for music brought me to The Grapes of Wrath. Violin is my passion, but I also enjoy playing the piano and mandolin and am currently attempting to learn the art of yodeling.
My latest performances include playing my violin at a few weddings and rapping for a local Davis band (tha dirt feelin'). My favorite performance onstage: fiddling, singing, and dancing in my back yard around a bonfire with friends.
-- Kristen Guggenheim (Musician)
My emphasis was acting but my experience in broadcasting, in a previous career, is what parlayed into a staff position. I have designed sound for hundreds of UC Davis productions over the years.
The most exciting of them all was Noises Off in 1993, directed by Harry Johnson, UCD faculty emeritus.
-- Ned Jacobson (Grampa)
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