TV REVIEW : A Searing ‘Grapes of Wrath’

At the end of “The Grapes of Wrath” tonight on PBS, during a downpour and huddled in a barn, the Joad family’s daughter, Rose of Sharon, gives a starving black man the nourishing milk of her breast. John Steinbeck’s epic American novel has moved beyond wrath to the theme (voiced by a spiritual ex-preacher) that “a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, on’y a piece of a big one.”

It’s the true ending that Hollywood did not dare shoot in 1940. Nor did John Ford’s movie include the scene of Rose of Sharon giving birth to a still-born baby and how the baby’s corpse was put in a box and floated down a swollen river as a testament of deliverance. That’s also dramatized in this 2 1/2-hour “American Playhouse” production (at 9:30 on KCET Channel 28), which propels the program’s 10th season and caps a double weekly entry (following the “Playhouse” launching on Wednesday with Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”).

Let’s see the fear mongers and guardians of morality grapple with this ending. It’s the ultimate test: a dying black man sucking a white woman’s bare breast on television as a beatific coda from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and an American classic.

All of this is important because how many people, outside of American lit majors, read Steinbeck anymore? They learn about him through movie adaptations. As true to the spine and rhythm of the novel as the old Henry Fonda movie was, it was not as close to the book’s spirit as this production. The show was originally created in 1988 by a theatrical company in Chicago, Steppenwolf, and staged in San Diego and London before it hit Broadway last year and garnered Tonys for best Broadway drama and best direction (by Frank Galati, who adapted the novel to the stage).

What the viewer has to do to appreciate its achievement--which blends lyrical, dramatic and epic elements--is adjust to a different level of television modality altogether. This is not a novel shot for television, such as the “Grapes of Wrath”-like network TV movie aired on NBC last month, the estimable “Long Road Home.” This show is much too stylized for that.

The theatrical elements include musty lighting, cyclorama sets, planks, fire and rain, the use of narrators reading short passages from the novel, and country music (banjo, harmonica, guitar). In fact, the music score (Michael Smith) echoes the quaint melodies that helped propel PBS’ “Civil War” series last fall.

The acting is weathered, like the caked earth, led by Terry Kinney’s raggedy beacon of light, the heroic Casy, Gary Sinise’s visceral Tom Joad and Lois Smith’s indomitable Ma (all Tony-nominated). It’s not a question of admiring these characters. You believe them. That’s what good acting is all about.

Reviled as Oakies, the Joads spill out of their creaking Hudson motor car into the orchards of the rich San Joaquin Valley to find, not jobs, but anti-union goons with pick handles. Heads crack.

You have to be dead not to connect these California homeless of the 1930s with today’s homeless, and who could have imagined that Steinbeck’s club-wielding cops would reverberate in the news today?

The impact is numbingly timely: As Tom Joad, who’s just knocked a deputy cold, prepares to light out for his own safety, he tells Ma that his spirit is intact, “that whenever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.” (“The Grapes of Wrath” was published in 1939.)

There’s one thing the production can’t do as well as the movie, and that’s its comparative inability to mirror the desolate Dust Bowl and the golden promise of California’s farm valleys and orchards. Words and lighting effects can’t replace Gregg Toland’s brilliant cinematography in the ’40 movie. But Steppenwolf is much more true to Steinbeck’s stated goal: to “rip a (viewer’s) nerves to rags.”