I have a Facebook page, believe it or not, but I don’t do Irony Lite, nor do I care whether other people find my tastes insufficiently cool, much less insufficiently “white” (by which Stuff White People Like, needless to say, means something very different from that which was meant when I was growing up in southeast Missouri half a lifetime ago).
As it happens, I tried to take Stuff White People Like’s Facebook test yesterday, but gave it up after running into three consecutive questions for which my answer was None of the above, which was not an option….
Kingsley Amis is interviewed by Simon Raven on Monitor. The interview, introduced by Huw Wheldon, was originally telecast by the BBC on February 2, 1958:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the latest American Shakespeare Center webcast, a revival of Frank Galati’s stage version of The Grapes of Wrath. Here’s an excerpt.
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Whether on stage or screen, John Steinbeck’s novels play better than they read, a fact that was proved yet again when Frank Galati turned “The Grapes of Wrath”into a stage play written for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. First performed there in 1988, it transferred to Broadway in 1990 and won a best-play Tony, beating out Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” and August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” An exceptionally fine adaptation that continues to be revived, its virtues are now on display courtesy of Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center, whose touring company, based in Staunton, taped a performance in March in ASC’s 300-seat Blackfriars Playhouse, a modern historical recreation of a theater built in London in 1596 that has been transformed into an online soundstage for the duration of the pandemic.
Directed by José Zayas and presented on an open Elizabethan-style stage, Mr. Galati’s no-frills “Grapes of Wrath,” like John Ford’s classic 1940 film version, strips away much of Steinbeck’s preachiness to focus on the stony-hard lives of the Joad family, who flee the smothering dust and debt of Depression-era Oklahoma and drive their rickety, overstuffed jalopy to California in search of hope. The result is a play full of contemporary echoes that are both unexpected and unforced, performed by ASC with a sober plainness of utterance that pierces the heart like a well-honed arrow….
