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Cal Shakes Review: Pastures of Heaven
Jun. 5th, 2010 03:57 pmThe Cal Shakes season has started and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thread_walker and I have season tickets as usual. The first item on the menu was a brand new (just commissioned) treatment of Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. Given that the original is a cycles of a dozen loosely-connected short stories (all set in the eponymous valley near Monterey, and with overlapping sets of characters), this must have been a bit of a challenge to interpret for live theater performance. Evidently the creative group doing the interpretation has a preference for hewing closely to the verbatim language of their root works -- which in this case came out as the characters often self-narrating bits of their stories along the lines of "And so I did X, Y, and Z and Q happened to me." But there was a fair amount of variety in how the various stories were presented, with one done as a musical duet.
Taking into account that the play is still in shake-down mode (we were at the very first public performance) ... I was at first put a little off balance by what felt like a somewhat slapstick comedic approach to the first couple of story lines. I've never really associated Steinbeck with comedy. But as the work progressed, it settled more into the mode of "the quiet desperation of good-hearted people having their lives go tragically sideways, even -- or especially -- when they're trying their hardest to do the right thing." Now that's Steinbeck. I think without the somewhat more lighthearted opening, the overall tone might be a bit oppressively grim. As it was, even though the closing portion was strongly in the "plans fail, people move away, things burn down" vein, it felt like there was an overall balance and coherence.
As usual for Cal Shakes, there was a lot of multiple-part-coverage by the cast. All the primary performers had several key roles, depending on which set of characters was the focus of the scene, and we kept cycling back through previous roles (or cycling back to the same characters at different times in their lives). Good iconic costuming helped keep things straight, but I confess that towards the end I wanted to start drawing out little family tree charts with interactional circles and arrows to help me keep up with the shifts.
One of the nice touches, given that Steinbeck was a writer with a strong sense of place, was the way the script assumed local knowledge and familiarity -- particularly in a few in-jokes. There was one great line about "and from there you can get to Salinas, and once you get to Salinas -- why, you could go anywhere in the world!" Although the valley of the setting is mythic in feel, the characters travel come from, and leave for, familiar places: Salinas, Monterey, San Francisco. It would be interesting to see how the work plays to more distant audiences, but I suspect something would be lost.
The Cal Shakes venue has been going major renovations since last season, with a new infrastructure building to house the snack bar and restrooms. (Big cheer during the opening announcements for the new, larger, single-sex restrooms!) The changes are all for the good that I can see. I didn't really notice any significant changes to the performance space itself (other than the usual set changes, of course).
thread_walker and I have season tickets as usual. The first item on the menu was a brand new (just commissioned) treatment of Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. Given that the original is a cycles of a dozen loosely-connected short stories (all set in the eponymous valley near Monterey, and with overlapping sets of characters), this must have been a bit of a challenge to interpret for live theater performance. Evidently the creative group doing the interpretation has a preference for hewing closely to the verbatim language of their root works -- which in this case came out as the characters often self-narrating bits of their stories along the lines of "And so I did X, Y, and Z and Q happened to me." But there was a fair amount of variety in how the various stories were presented, with one done as a musical duet.Taking into account that the play is still in shake-down mode (we were at the very first public performance) ... I was at first put a little off balance by what felt like a somewhat slapstick comedic approach to the first couple of story lines. I've never really associated Steinbeck with comedy. But as the work progressed, it settled more into the mode of "the quiet desperation of good-hearted people having their lives go tragically sideways, even -- or especially -- when they're trying their hardest to do the right thing." Now that's Steinbeck. I think without the somewhat more lighthearted opening, the overall tone might be a bit oppressively grim. As it was, even though the closing portion was strongly in the "plans fail, people move away, things burn down" vein, it felt like there was an overall balance and coherence.
As usual for Cal Shakes, there was a lot of multiple-part-coverage by the cast. All the primary performers had several key roles, depending on which set of characters was the focus of the scene, and we kept cycling back through previous roles (or cycling back to the same characters at different times in their lives). Good iconic costuming helped keep things straight, but I confess that towards the end I wanted to start drawing out little family tree charts with interactional circles and arrows to help me keep up with the shifts.
One of the nice touches, given that Steinbeck was a writer with a strong sense of place, was the way the script assumed local knowledge and familiarity -- particularly in a few in-jokes. There was one great line about "and from there you can get to Salinas, and once you get to Salinas -- why, you could go anywhere in the world!" Although the valley of the setting is mythic in feel, the characters travel come from, and leave for, familiar places: Salinas, Monterey, San Francisco. It would be interesting to see how the work plays to more distant audiences, but I suspect something would be lost.
The Cal Shakes venue has been going major renovations since last season, with a new infrastructure building to house the snack bar and restrooms. (Big cheer during the opening announcements for the new, larger, single-sex restrooms!) The changes are all for the good that I can see. I didn't really notice any significant changes to the performance space itself (other than the usual set changes, of course).
