Manchay como estructura en la cultura y la sociedad

structure, The Grapes of Wrath would not at first seem suitable for adaptation to the stage. And indeed, a sprawling stage ver- sion by William Adams, who also directed it in a production by Paul Gregory, played at only a few colleges in 1978, and then went nowhere. It was notable mainly for having

John Carradine repeat his film role as Jim

Casy.

A far more successful stage adaptation appeared when Frank Galati wrote and directed his version for Chicago’s Steppen- wolf Theatre Company. This version opened in September 1988 at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago, was restaged the following May at the La Jolla Play- house, and opened in June for an extended run in London. On March 22, 1990, it started a highly acclaimed run at the Cort Theater in New York, where it won the Tony Award as best play of 1990. Galati also won the Tony as best director, and several cast mem- bers (Gary Sinise as Tom Joad, Lois Smith as Ma, and Terry Kinney as Casy) were nominated. Galati condensed the 619 pages and thirty chapters of the novel into ten scenes and ninety pages of acting script, published in 1991 by the Dramatists Play Service. In doing so, he used Steinbeck’s dialogue almost entirely verbatim, stating that only five or six lines in the play are not from the novel. Unlike Adams, who lifted large blocks of language unedited, Galati skillfully cut not only episodes but lines of dialogue within scenes, reducing each scene to its essence, tightening and speeding the narrative. For Steinbeck’s interchapters,

which Adams had chanted in clumsy choral reading, Galati provided musical transi- tions by Michael Smith, who played the Man with a Guitar; other transitions were accompanied by musical saw, jaw harp, fid- dle, banjo, harmonica, accordion, and bass. Although Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay also retained much of Steinbeck’s language, the Steppenwolf production is far more faithful to Steinbeck’s narrative, especially at the end, which retains the flood, starva- tion, and the conclusion of Rosasharn’s offering her breast to feed a starving old man, who in this case is black.

Galati’s production was also far more realistic than that of Adams, which used a bare stage with several platforms that func- tioned as a truck and various buildings. The Steppenwolf staging included an actual truck that could move ahead, back up, and turn; three fire boxes for campfires; a tank of water that functioned variously as the Colo- rado River and the final flood, and a down- pour of rain on an immense barn gate. Galati said that he had to retain the story’s vital elements of earth, air, fire, and water.

The Steppenwolf production was reprised for television on PBS’s American

Playhouse in March 1991. It was introduced

by Elaine Scott Steinbeck, on the stage of the Cort Theater, who explained why her husband would have loved it. Because of the filming, this time it was directed by Kirk

Browning, who took full advantage of cam- era angles, medium shots, and close-ups to minimize the sense that it was a filmed stage production and to create a greater sense of realism. Unlike the 1940 movie, with its newsreel-looking black and white photography, this version was in color, so Browning had to recapture the look of the Depression through the performances, and he succeeded to a remarkable degree. Pre- sented during a severe recession, with hordes of homeless and hungry people in the United States, the Steppenwolf produc- tion showed that Steinbeck’s drama is by no means dated; its rage is as alive as ever, as many reviews at the time indicated. (See also

Joads, The; Grapes of Wrath, The (book);

Further Reading: Morsberger, Robert. “Stein-

beck and Steppenwolf: The Enduring Rage for Justice.” Steinbeck Newsletter 7 (Winter 1994): 6–11.

Robert E. Morsberger

GRASTIAN, SIR. In The Acts of King

Arthur, the knight who guards and protects

the kingdoms of Ban and Bors while they are in England helping King Arthur in his war against the eleven rebel lords of the North.

GRAUBARD, MARK (1904–). Steinbeck may have read Graubard’s Man the Slave and

Master: A Biological Approach to the Potential- ities of Modern Society (1938) around the time

he was writing The Grapes of Wrath; Rob-

ert DeMott notes that a copy of the book bears his and Carol Henning Steinbeck’s stamp. Graubard’s aim with this book, as he states, is “to present a picture of man’s place in the biologic world from the viewpoint of the species as a whole,” and thus squares with Steinbeck’s philosophical and artistic goals in Grapes. The book culminates in “A Call for Scientific Humanism,” reflecting Graubard’s (and largely Steinbeck’s) desire to see the true place of the human species by breaking through anthropocentric precon- ceptions and by adopting a scientifically objective perspective. Like Steinbeck, Graubard understood Darwin’s prominence in this holistic understanding.

Further Reading: Railsback, Brian. Parallel

Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck. Moscow: University of Idaho Press,

1995.

GRAVES, GLEN (1902–1983). One of Stein- beck’s earliest neighborhood friends. Stein- beck spent most of his youth in Salinas with Graves and his other close friend, Max Wag-

ner. When Steinbeck left Salinas to attend

Stanford University, Graves and Steinbeck stayed in contact, with Steinbeck often com- ing home during school hiatuses to play cards and hike with his childhood friend.

Ted Scholz

GRAVES, MISS. A resident of Pacific Grove who sings the lead in the annual Butterfly Pag- eant in Sweet Thursday. She is a young, fourth-grade teacher, described as nice, rather pretty, and rather tired. Apparently a woman of some imagination, she sees a leprechaun in back of the reservoir on Sweet Thursday. However, two days before the Great Butter- fly Festival is scheduled to begin, she loses her voice. Sprays and injections prove inef- fectual in restoring her voice, reduced to a dry squawk and a croak. On the second Sweet Thursday, her voice finally comes back all by itself, as do the tardy millions of monarch butterflies.

Bruce Ouderkirk

GRAVES, MULEY. A neighbor of the

Joadsin The Grapes of Wrath, Muley meets

Tom Joad and Jim Casy at the former Joad residence and relates the tale of how families are being tractored out and why the home- stead is deserted. As his name suggests, Muley is stubborn, especially about being evicted from his land. He describes himself as a ghost, haunting the drought-stricken land, in hopes of finding renewal or at least of preventing his property from falling into the hands of strangers. Like Granpa, Muley cannot imagine being separated from the land, which he identifies with such impor- tant events as birth and death in his personal history. Muley tells Casy and Tom of his determination to stay despite the nightly threats he receives from the landowners. When he offers Tom and Casy a meal of cooked jackrabbit, Muley not only provides the first witness to the necessity of sharing, but he also gives Tom an opportunity to relate the full details of the crime that caused him to be confined in prison. Determined to retain his heritage and refusing the opportu- nity of a new life, Muley retreats to his cave hideaway after the Joads’ departure, prefer- ring to hold out for as long as possible rather than transfer his life elsewhere.

Michael J. Meyer

GRAY, MARLENE. Gray was a young col- lege graduate whom John and Elaine Scott

Gregory, Susan (“Sue”) 137

Steinbeck met in 1952 and who served as a personal secretary to the author during his stay in Paris in 1954. As typist for the arti- cles Steinbeck was commissioned to write for Le Figaro, Gray was responsible not only for transcription of the dictated text but also was charged with its translation into French, a task that was not so easily accom- plished. When a faulty translation was withdrawn by Gray as an inadequate repre- sentation of Steinbeck’s thoughts, an editor for Le Figaro complained to the author about missed deadlines. Initially Steinbeck was exasperated by Gray’s actions, which he felt damaged his reputation, but later he and Gray became close friends. Gray also helped critique Steinbeck’s speech given over Radio Free Europe in the summer of 1954, assisting in his desire to deliver the address in the languages of the Soviet satel- lite countries: Hungarian, Rumanian, Pol- ish, and Czech.

Further Reading: Benson, Jackson J. The

True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New

York: Viking, 1984.

Michael J. Meyer

“GREAT MOUNTAINS, THE” (1933). The second short story in The Red Pony cycle was first published in the North American Review in December 1933. Gitano, an old Hispanic man, returns to the ranch where his family formerly lived so that he might die where his father did. Jody Tiflin’s father, Carl, says that the old man may stay overnight but cannot remain on the ranch. During the night, after Gitano shows Jody the rapier that is his one remaining treasure, Gitano takes a once fine horse named Easter (an old animal Carl says must be shot) and wanders off with him into the Gabilan mountains.

GREAT TIDE POOL. In Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, an area on the tip of the peninsula of Monterey where Doc col- lects various marine species. The Great Tide Pool, rich in diversity, is a microcosm of nature, a place of life and death, of procre- ation and murder. Ordinarily, Doc takes

great pleasure in witnessing the drama of this marine theater, just as he enjoys observ- ing the teeming life around him on Cannery

Row. Early in Sweet Thursday, when Doc begins to turn over a large rock in the tide pool and then, preoccupied, drops it back into place, it is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong with him, and at that point, he also wonders why a strange discontent has settled over him.

Bruce Ouderkirk

GREEN LADY, THE. Play authored by

Steinbeck’s friend Webster “Toby” Street. Steinbeck’s later involvement with the material resulted in the novel To a God

Unknown, his third book to be published

but begun before his second, The Pastures

of Heaven. The original play, like the Stein-

beck novel, has a protagonist who experi- ences a very close connection with nature. Additionally, the material appealed to Steinbeck’s impulses toward the grotesque and the mystical he observed in the natural world. According to Jackson J. Benson, the key factor in Steinbeck’s adaptation of the material was the fact that he was able to cre- ate settings and characters with which he was familiar, often imbuing the latter with traits belonging to relatives and close friends. In addition, the play provided him with a chance to refine his prose and to restrain his somewhat lyrical poetical excesses of expression. Steinbeck tried to reshape Street’s ideas until the summer of 1929, but he finally abandoned the rewrite and began his own version of the material. Taking his title from one of the Vedic hymns, he gradually eliminated the plot line of the original source and moved toward a psychological study that was entirely his own and that incorporated sev- eral of the fertility myths he had been dis- cussing with Joseph Campbell.

Michael J. Meyer

GREGORY, SUSAN (“SUE”). A Spanish teacher at the high school in Monterey, she was a friend of Steinbeck’s in 1933 while he was composing Tortilla Flat. She knew the

local paisanos who lived on the outskirts of town and provided Steinbeck numerous sto- ries and information, therefore helping as an important resource as he put the book together. Steinbeck also saw Harriet Gragg, an older woman who also spoke Spanish. “Both Hattie and Sue were good storytellers, excel- lent sources for Steinbeck,” Jackson J. Benson notes. Though both women helped Steinbeck, they were not his only sources about paisano life as he composed Tortilla Flat.

Further Reading: Benson, Jackson J. The True

Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York:

Viking, 1984.

GREW, JAMES. Cathy Ames’s high school Latin teacher in East of Eden, who had failed divinity school. He and the fourteen-year-old Cathy become involved romantically and probably sexually as well. One night, James goes to the Ameses’ house late, demanding to talk to William Ames, Cathy’s father, who denies James entrance and forestalls the conversation. Later that night, probably out of guilt and desperation, James shoots himself in the head with a shotgun in front of the church altar. Afterward, and in the absence of any suicide note, Cathy tells her parents that James had been in trouble in Boston, a lie that spreads and is unquestion- ingly accepted as truth.

Margaret Seligman

GRIFFIN, MR. Owner of Griffin’s Saloon in

East of Eden, where Alf Nichelson tells Joe

Valery that Faye’s death might be suspicious and that Kate Albey is Adam Trask’s wife.

GRIPPO, BLACK. In Cup of Gold, Black Grippo and Henry Morgan sail together on the Ganymede. Henry had believed that taking a Spanish ship in battle would bring happiness. He is disappointed, however, because these victories do not bring even contentment.

GROSS, ARABELLA. In Tortilla Flat, the fickle woman Jesus Maria Corcoran tries

unsuccessfully to woo with lingerie. When we first meet Jesus Maria sleeping in a ditch, he explains how he found a rowboat the previous day and sold it to buy Arabella a bottle of whiskey and a pair of silk draw- ers, only to have her taken away from him by a group of soldiers. Jesus Maria vows this night to use his remaining money to buy Arabella a brassiere to match her draw- ers, but when he tries to give it to her, the soldiers return and beat him, with Ara- bella’s help. He never gives up on the elu- sive Arabella, as evidenced by his opposition to his friends’ plan to give the brassiere to Danny instead as a gift for Mrs.

Morales. The failed courtship of Arabella may be read as one of the novel’s many instances in which false values such as materialism disrupt the natural course of relationships.

GROSS, MR. A customer at the Golden Poppy restaurant in Sweet Thursday. After

Suzy learns about Doc’s broken arm, she is so distraught that she calls Mr. Gross “you” and nauseates him by serving his eggs straight up.

GRYFFET, SIR. In The Acts of King Arthur, the young squire, later made a knight by King

Arthur, who rides to challenge King Pelli-

nore after the death of Sir Miles. He is wounded in the ensuing joust but made a Knight of the Round Table on King Pelli- nore’s recommendation after the war with the Five Kings.

GUAJARDO, JESÚS COLONEL. In Viva

Zapata!, he is the direct cause of Emiliano

Zapata’s death. He is not the mastermind of the plan to assassinate Emiliano—that was

Fernando Aguirre’s idea—but he is the one who carries out the plan. In a courtyard, Guajardo presents Emiliano with his beloved horse, Blanco. Guajardo steps back- ward, steadily and silently pulling out his sword, which signals his men to send a fusillade of bullets into Emiliano’s body. Jesús is the ironic name of Zapata’s mur- derer.

Gwenliana 139

GUINEVERE. In The Acts of King Arthur, the daughter of King Lodegrance of Camy-

larde, who gives her hand in marriage to

King Arthur. Arthur has loved her from the time he first set eyes on her when he visited King Lodegrance’s court some years before, and is determined to marry her despite

Merlin’s warnings that she will be unfaith- ful to him with his dearest and most trusted friend. She becomes the lover of Sir Lance-

lot, thus fulfilling Merlin’s prophecy.

GUINZBURG, HAROLD (1899–1961).