A Political Companion to John Steinbeck

Chapter 3. The Novelist as Playwright: Adaptation, Politics, and the Plays of John Steinbeck

The Novelist as Playwright: Adaptation, Politics, and the Plays of John Steinbeck 77 THE AUTHOR OF SOME twenty-seven novels and works of nonfiction, John Steinbeck was unmistakably committed to prose. Yet according to Brooks Atkinson, theater critic for the New York Times, he could have easily been one of America’s greatest playwrights, crafting works designed for performance and not simply for private reading. Steinbeck’s “first play,” Atkinson writes, “is the quintessence of commercial theatre and it is also a masterpiece.”1 The occasion for Atkinson’s praise was the 1937 Broadway premier of Of Mice and Men, the first of three plays Steinbeck would pen over his lifetime. The second would be an adaptation of his 1942 novel The Moon Is Down, which opened on Broadway in the same year, and the third an adaptation of Burning Bright in 1950. Curiously, Steinbeck attempted playwriting only three times in his prolific career. Despite his avowed affinity for prose, both fiction and nonfiction, he had no aversion to the dramatic form as such. He would see no fewer than seventeen of his novels turned into films and would garner three Academy Award nominations for his efforts in screenwriting. By all accounts, Steinbeck could have easily enjoyed similar success in what was then known as the “legitimate” stage. But Steinbeck’s engagement with the theater was a strategic one, more of an attempt to add a component of political action to his writing than an investment in the world of the theater as such. For a writer often criticized for declaiming high principles without offering any means of achieving them, Steinbeck’s stage adaptations offered a kind of direct political outlet: a way to communicate his perspectives to a mass audience, rousing them to new understandings and to new action. Writing theater was, for Steinbeck, CHAPTER 3 Donna Kornhaber 78 Donna Kornhaber not just a matter of working in another artistic mode; as for many of his contemporaries, it was also a political act unto itself. Of Mice and Men, his first theatrical effort, appeared well before Steinbeck had reached the height of his fame as a novelist (indeed, several of the New York theater critics who reviewed the play, including Atkinson, were not previously familiar with Steinbeck’s fiction). It opened at one of the premier theaters in New York—Broadway’s Music Box Theatre—and ran for an impressive 207 performances before transferring to London. What is more, it was directed by George S. Kaufman, coauthor of some of the most popular comedies of the 1920s and 1930s, including Dinner at Eight and You Can’t Take It with You, and one of the most acclaimed theatrical directors of the era. Critic Russell Rhodes described Kaufman as “the theatre’s miracle man.”2 Yet Steinbeck did not even leave his home in California to attend the New York production. Commentators who have considered Steinbeck’s theatrical efforts— perhaps one of the most understudied aspects of his heavily scrutinized career—have regarded them largely as a side interest and ultimately a trivial pursuit. It was not disgust that kept Steinbeck from his first Broadway premier, as was sometimes the case with other playwrights of the era—occasionally even Eugene O’Neill. He is known to have had a good rapport with Kaufman. They spent several months perfecting the final script, and Steinbeck is said to have been quite proud of their final product.3 Most commentators have therefore simply attributed to Steinbeck a lack of interest in the stage. But to disregard or downplay Steinbeck’s theatrical pursuits is to overlook a powerful key to his thoughts as a political writer. Although theater may have largely lost its political function today, in the 1930s it was perhaps the political-literary form par excellence—far more left-leaning and politically engaged as a medium than either prose fiction or film. To understand the politics of the theatrical world that Steinbeck entered is to better understand the political import of his work as a whole. Far more than a vanity project or side pursuit, Steinbeck’s theatrical efforts constitute an attempt to harness the political power of the stage: to add an active political dimension to some of his most politically minded works. Insofar as a writer in the first third of the twentieth century could ever hope to turn political narrative into political action, the stage was the means by which to do it. Steinbeck’s...