Hopkins Center for the Arts

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DARTMOUTH THEATER DEPARTMENT

Grapes of Wrath

by Frank Galati
Based on the novel by John Steinbeck
Directed by Peter Hackett

Peter Hackett, chair
Daniel Kotlowitz, director of theater

Thurs–Sat, February 19–21 • 8 pm
Wed–Fri, February 25–27 • 8 pm
Sat, February 28 • 2 pm
The Moore Theater
$12 • DS $3 • AOS $6

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Dust hangs like fog over the plains. The wind howls. Failed crops dot the landscape like bones. Farmers have lost their land and their homes—the country is in a Depression, and the highway is a stream of people migrating to the green valleys of California. In this brilliant adaptation of Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novel, playwright Frank Galati re-creates through the journey of the Joad family—one of the multitude of dispossessed—the epic struggle to survive, the search for dignity and the power of the human spirit. Using simple staging and the fundamental elements of earth, rain and fire—and the Joads' Hudson Super Six pickup truck—Galati captures the brutality of the times: the campfires, labor camps, cops and growers, strikers and strike breakers, violence and starvation, humans on the brink of capitulation. A haunting score of heartland folk songs, hymns and road songs, played onstage by migrant minstrels, weaves like a thread through the play, echoing the bittersweet strains of promise and loss. Galati's Grapes of Wrath, which won a Tony for Best Play in 1990, ends in an iconic scene, an ultimate act of charity, leaving us with the tattered hope that in America, the possibility of compassion or heroism, justice or generosity, is still alive.


Part of Class Divide, a three-year Hopkins Center initiative examining social and economic class issues.