'The Grapes of Wrath' revives traditional folk

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The rehearsal room at Asolo Repertory Theatre’s Koski Center goes quiet. Amidst the final few weeks of rehearsal there’s no time for the production team or actors to slow down.

But suddenly, they pause. It happens when three imperative members of the cast — musicians Tim Grimm, Carmela Pedicini and Sara Moone — start playing one of the songs used in the production.

The trio perches on the back of a lumber-covered Hudson truck used as set piece. It’s as if the truck drove straight out of the 1930s Dust Bowl into the Koski rehearsal center and scenic shop, Oklahoma plates and all. Similarly, it’s as if the three musicians are Oakies themselves.

Pedicini percussively plucks her banjo. Moone wails on the fiddle and Grimm strums and finger picks his guitar. Their feet tap as  somber yet hopeful American folk singing takes over the rehearsal room.

“We don’t want your handouts mister / We don’t want no charity / we want to work and stay together / and pick the fruit, land of the free,” they sing.

It’s more than just background music. The women’s moving, heartfelt harmony paired with Grimm’s rough melody portray another side to “The Grapes of Wrath” — the music becomes a character. The three musicians will provide music on stage to accompany the production as members of the cast. It runs through April 19 at Asolo Repertory Theatre.

They play poor migrant worker musicians fleeing the Dust Bowl in mid-1930s Oklahoma. They travel in the same party as the Joad family, on which the play centers.

Music was important to the migrants — no matter how bad life got, they continued singing, listening to music and performing around the campfire. It’s authentic and a natural expression of emotion of the characters.

“Music is important to all of us all the time,” says Michael Donald Edwards, the director of the production and producing artistic director of Asolo Rep. “We express in music what we find difficult to express in life.”

The Joads head to California with the hope of finding work, and instead, find the Great Depression. They are faced with challenges and respond accordingly. The music helps portray the characters’ internalizations.

“You see how the Joads respond and how their inner strengths keep them going both on the physical journey and in their hearts and minds,” Grimm says.  “And, we do that with the music, too.”

In real life, Composer and Musical Director Tim Grimm is just as rural as the handful of characters he plays in “The Grapes of Wrath.” He grew up in Southern Indiana down the road from fellow folk-artist John Mellencamp.

The singer-songwriter-actor still lives in rural Indiana on 80 acres of half wooded land and half rolling hills with his family, three quarter horses, a dog and four cats. That is, when he’s not traveling the world as a musician or hanging out with his mentor and friend, fellow folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Elliott told him stories of the time he spent getting to know Woodie Guthrie as research for his composition.
Grimm is the only cast member of the production who was in the production in 2005. That year was the first time Edwards directed the play for both Syracuse Stage and Indiana Repertory Theatre in a joint production.

Edwards decided to employ a composer-actor-singer-songwriter to update the music to the production. Grimm was an actor occasionally working with Indiana Repertory Theatre (IRT). Edwards learned about Grimm through the artistic director of IRT and listened to a few of his songs.

“As soon as I met him, I knew,” Edwards says of Grimm.

There had always been music in Frank Galati’s production, originally scored by Michael Smith. Smith’s was more of an urban take to Grimm’s rural idea.

Grimm composed a few original songs for the production, hailing Woody Guthrie as his iconic muse. Guthrie sang many songs about his own Dust Bowl experience traveling with migrant workers to California. The score also includes some traditional folk songs.

Grimm changed his tour dates and took some time off from his schedule to work on and be in the Asolo Repertory Theatre production. Last April, Grimm came to Sarasota to help Edwards audition local and regional musicians to join the cast as his band.

Two women stood out to both Grimm and Edwards: Sara Moone and Carmela Pedicini. They liked that they were already a local band, Passerine. Their harmonies already gelled.

In the Indiana/Syracuse production it had been a trio of all men without a violin. Edwards is thrilled with how the trio has turned out on stage.

“It’s so wonderful to have two women being the musicians,” Edwards says. “It sounds like a new score to me.”

Notes with Frank Galati
Frank Galati won two Tony awards for his adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” from 1990. He directed the original production, and now it’s published in more than 10 languages and is performed all over the world as far as London, Iceland, Japan and Israel.

You live here, so why didn’t you direct it?
Michael Donald Edwards is the artistic director and he chose to direct it…I myself have done it somewhat exhaustedly.

Have you been involved in the process?
I’ve had lots of conversations with Michael. I’ve talked to individual members of the cast about their roles, answered questions that have come up about the text and I have seen rehearsal….I’m kind of overwhelmed that it’s part of the season..and that a company as distinguished as Asolo Rep would be producing it.

Is there anything that you changed or anything that you’d like to change in your adaptation?
No. It’s a piece that was made over a long, long time. Every time we did a production, there were changes. Its first performance was more than four hours long, so the first thing I did was prune, edit and remove characters and scenes to try and make it as streamlined, efficient and as quickly moving with a kind of imperative velocity…I’m happy with the shape of the script, and there are plenty of invitations (for the director) to make changes in terms of the use of music, scenery, lighting and so on.

IF YOU GO 
‘The Grapes of Wrath’
When: Opens 8 p.m. March 14 and runs through April 19.
Where: Asolo Repertory Theatre, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail
Cost: Tickets $21 to $76
Info: Call 351-8000 or visit AsoloRep.org.