Heaven in Oakland—a Halfway Point

"In talking about the house on the Battle Farm, and how the townspeople in the Pastures of Heaven view it, I asked kids if they knew of places like this in their own lives. One student said there were ghost stories about a house he knew of where a person had died in the basement. Others said they knew of places that were really worn down. I said, 'Yeah, they may be abandoned, like how the Mustrovics had to suddenly up and leave.' Another student chimed in, 'We call those bandos.' I thought about our current economy and how it might be more timely than I thought to have empty, worn-down houses in their very midst due to foreclosures."

That's an excerpt of a blog by Emily Morrison, Cal Shakes Artistic Learning Programs Manager. She's teaching John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven to eighth-graders as part of a residency at E.C. Reems, an Oakland charter school, and blogging about it at OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons. We'll be excerpting the blog and linking to it in this space as the residency continues, building toward a community event featuring student readings and artwork in mid-December. Read the full blog entry for a window onto Morrison's arts education experience.

Pictured above: Emily teaches at at a 2007 Cal Shakes Summer Shakespeare Conservatory; photo by Jay Yamada.

Entering into The Pastures of Heaven

So folks, we just ended a full week of workshopping the first complete draft of Octavio Solis’ adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. We’re premiering it next year on our Main Stage, and it was quite a week.

Octavio’s play is, simply, beautiful. On the path to making a play, you look for its DNA: what it’s made of. Changes will be made—cuts, rearrangements of scenes, additions, etc.—but what needs to be there at one point is the play’s DNA. Its self. Octavio’s Pastures has real DNA. It has a genuine theatrical life, blending Word for Word’s sensibility of translating literature into theater with my love of the nakedness of storytelling in the hands of actors (as we explored in Nicholas Nickleby). But more importantly, it has heart. And poetry. It’s also very very funny. And that’s all Octavio. He pulls Steinbeck’s quiet words off the page and finds the juxtapositions between humor and pathos in a way that makes me happy to feel like I am in the hands of a Chekhovian writer.

We assembled a group of actors, some of whom had been with the process since it started two years ago, and some new actors. And all were splendid collaborators, able to make characters distinct and alive in an extremely short time; also able to ask smart questions of the text that will inevitably inform our next steps in the development of the piece; and most of all, united, in just six days, into an ensemble. Which is what this play celebrates: the storytelling of an ensemble of actors. It’s sheer theater—authentic and alive.

We invited some funders, board members, staff, and patrons to the “window on the work” yesterday, reading abou half of the play. The feeling in the room was palpable—there was something special going on here. I was, to be quite sentimental, extremely proud, moved, and almost speechless (and for those of you who know me, that is no small feat) by the presence of a wonderful new American play, inspired by one of our great American writers—a classic writer if you will—at a Theater that is taking a big leap forward in defining who it is.

The great folks at Arena Stage sent someone out to chronicle the process. They, along with the NEA, were partners in selecting John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven as one of five NEA Distinguished New American Plays. This, along with support from the Irvine Foundation and other amazing foundations, is making it possible for us to do this piece. And our subscribers delight in the surprises we make for them. So their spirit was in the room as we made steps in the creation of this piece. And our staff, led by the great Jessica Richards, producer of the project, was there every step of the way.

Hence the pride, the being moved, and the almost-speechlessness. I couldn’t do this anywhere else but at Cal Shakes, and in the Bay Area, which is by far the best place in this country to take chances in theatrical expression.

There’s a lot of work still be done with the play, but Octavio knows where to go with it and what to do. Trust the playwright. Especially when it’s Octavio Solis, who listens more than he talks, takes in and thinks hard about what the actors and I are doing, and is open to the collaboration of the ensemble and myself.

I am genuinely happy about what happened last week, which is just a marker in the path of the making of this new American play. And our community engagement—with folks in Salinas, especially the young artists of Alisal Center for the Arts (whose mural inspired by The Pastures of Heaven will be on display at our Theater during the play’s run) as well as students in the Bay Area who are learning about Steinbeck and how to make literature come alive (via our excellent teaching artists)—makes this more than just a play-making process. It’s a community-building process. It makes it all bigger. It makes more impact. And it will forever change this Theater and, I hope, some of the communities we are reaching out to.

More anon.

Jonathan

Pictured above, from top: Jonathan speaks to project artists at the last Pastures workshop; Danny Scheie; Maya Lawson; Craig Marker; photos by Jay Yamada. View more at the New Works/New Communities Flickr page.

Steinbeck Blog Prompt #3 by Jonathan Moscone

The third and last in our series of three prompts, designed to help inform our upcoming Steinbeck Project workshop. The Cal Shakes New Works/New Communities program would love for you to leave your input in the "comments" section below, via prose, poetry, links to video, imagery, or audio, and whatever else you can think of. Posting your comments on an individual prompt blog during its first week gets you entered in a drawing to win a prize*, and all comments are eligible for publication in Cal Shakes newsletters, on our website, and/or in the program for John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven during our 2010 season.**

This week's prompt comes from Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone, who will be directing the Main Stage production of Pastures.

In Steinbeck's book of short stories, The Pastures of Heaven, lives are eternally changed by the smallest action, the merest word, the slightest touch. Life is not melodramatic, he seems to be saying. There are no good guys and bad guys; any of us can say something or do something that seems small and insignificant, and yet has the most epic, seismic effect on the life of someone else. Has this happened to you? What are those little moments that have had the biggest effect on your life? Or can you think of a small thing that you have done or said that inadvertently affected another person's life in a surprisingly large way?

Photo of Jonathan Moscone by Jay Yamada.

Steinbeck Blog Prompt #2: Identity and Community

This is the second in our series of three prompts, designed to help inform our upcoming Steinbeck Project workshop. The Cal Shakes New Works/New Communities program would love for you to leave your input in the "comments" section below, via prose, poetry, links to video or audio, and whatever else you can think of. Posting your comments on an individual prompt blog during its first week gets you entered in a drawing to win a prize*, and all comments are eligible for publication in Cal Shakes newsletters, on our website, and/or in the program for John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven during our 2010 season.**

And so now, without further ado, here's your second prompt, written by Trish Tillman, Cal Shakes’ Director of Artistic Learning and one of the developers of this fall’s Pastures of Heaven residency at Oakland’s Reems Academy.


As we develop our residency work in schools, one of the most important things that our students are trying to understand is the idea of identity in their own lives, and how one’s personality is shaped in relationship with others. If you can think back to middle or high school—or if you are that age now—you know how important social interactions can be to how you are perceived, and how you think about yourself.

One of the main themes of Steinbeck’s work is how complicated social interactions can be between disparate groups of people living in the same place. Much like a neighborhood or a school, his characters come together with certain expectations or desires about how they will live in the community in which they find themselves. When you enter a new group for the first time, what do you expect? How do you begin to understand those around you?


*Prize still to be determined. Please leave your email address somewhere in your comment!!
**Don't worry, we'll ask your permission first.
Art courtesy of an anonymous commenter on last week's blog.

Steinbeck Project Blog Prompt #1, by Octavio Solis

Here it is, the first in our series of three prompts, designed to help inform our upcoming Steinbeck Project workshop. The Cal Shakes New Works/New Communities program would love for you to leave your input in the "comments" section below, via prose, poetry, links to video or audio, and whatever else you can think of. Posting your comments on an individual prompt blog during its first week gets you entered in a drawing to win a prize*, and all comments are eligible for publication in Cal Shakes newsletters, on our website, and/or in the program for John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven during our 2010 season.**

And so now, without further ado, here's your first prompt, written by none other than Octavio Solis, the award-winning playwright of John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven.


In The Pastures of Heaven, as in most of his other novels dealing with Salinas, Steinbeck depicts the hard lives of the rural working class. There are migrant workers, chicken farmers, cattle ranchers, orchard growers, construction workers, etc., peppered throughout his works. Can you think of other contemporary writers working today who focus on this labor force? Has anyone in your background ever worked the land like Steinbeck's characters? What particular kind of work did they do?






*Prize still to be determined. Please leave your email address somewhere in your comment!!
**Don't worry, we'll ask your permission first.
Photo of Octavio Solis by Anne Hamersky.

Topics (and prizes!) for Steinbeck blog series

As we mentioned a week ago, the Cal Shakes New Works/New Communities program will be asking for your help in our development of John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, starting next Monday. On Oct 19 and 26 and Nov 2, we'll be posting thoughts from Pastures playwright Octavio Solis, Pastures director (and Cal Shakes Artistic Director) Jonathan Moscone, Cal Shakes Director of Artistic Learning Trish Tillman, and Word for Word Performing Arts Company Co-Artistic Director JoAnne Winter (the latter two are collaborating on school curriculum based on Pastures). Each of these blog entries will contain a prompt, and we'd like you to leave your input in the "comments" section, via prose, poetry, video, audio, and whatever else you can think of. Posting your comments on an individual prompt blog during its first week gets you entered in a drawing to win a fabulous prize*, and all comments are eligible for publication in Cal Shakes newsletters, on our website, and/or in the program for John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven during our 2010 season.**

Some things that have been discussed as possible topics include: the hard lives of the rural working class in literature and in real life; utopias; place names and what they mean; how one's landscape defines their possibilities; and fitting into a community. Most if not all of these topics will be covered in the ensuing weeks' prompts. Stay tuned!

*Fabulous prize still to be determined.
**Don't worry, we'll ask your permission first.

Coming Soon: Your Participation.

Beginning two weeks from today, the Cal Shakes New Works/New Communities program will be asking for your help in our development of John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven.

This play—which we've been developing in collaboration with award-winning playwright Octavio Solis and San Francisco's renowned Word for Word Performing Arts Company over the past two years as part of our Steinbeck Project—is now slotted to have its debut on the Cal Shakes Main Stage, kicking off our 2010 season.

But the script is not quite finished yet, and we have one more development workshop coming up in November. To further inform the development process, we'll be posting a series of three prompts on this blog, one every Monday starting October 19. The prompts will be crafted by playwright Solis, Pastures director (and Cal Shakes Artistic Director) Jonathan Moscone, Cal Shakes Director of Artistic Learning Trish Tillman, and Word for Word Co-Artistic Director JoAnne Winter. With each prompt, we'll be asking for your input, via prose, poetry, video, audio, and whatever else you'd like to leave in the "comments" section.

Curious? Check back in with us next Monday for a sneak preview of themes and topics. We can't wait to see what you'll bring to The Pastures of Heaven.

Pictured above: A rock formation in the Corral de Tierra area of Salinas; photo by Derek Smith.