Live streaming is as close as safety conscious audiences can get to a performance and as close as performers can get to the risk of doing it in real time. The Chicago duo of Megan Corse and Paul McComas will enact scenes from five John Steinbeck novels, capping their show with a couple of Steinbeck-inspired songs by Bruce Springsteen and X.
The performance will be live streamed at 7 p.m. Friday, June 5 in a benefit for Marquette University’s Center for Peacemaking, the Alma Center and Safe & Sound. A Milwaukee expat, McComas has kept close connections to his home city and has supported local nonprofits in recent years through performances.
He responded to some questions, stressing that he’s speaking only for himself and not the sponsoring organizations or his performance partner.
What does John Steinbeck have to say to us today? Is he speaking louder now after the results of the 2016 election?
Steinbeck was the anti-Trump. You couldn’t find two public figures, nor two human beings, more unalike. His upper-middle-class family was service- and knowledge-, not wealth- and self-, focused. His father served as the Monterey County [CA] treasurer, and his mother was a teacher who passed along to her children a love of literature. Young John worked in a series of blue-collar jobs, befriending and coming to understand and care for his coworkers—men and women, many of-color, who'd come up hard and logged long hours of tough manual labor to make ends meet.
I needn’t detail Donald Trump’s early years, nor the career that followed, beginning with his racist real-estate practices. His record is well known.
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Steinbeck’s talent and drive took him to the top—a Nobel Prize win—in a field with which he had no prior/inside connections. His key muse was the Great Depression: he humanized the have-nots, “the least of these,” by chronicling with authenticity and affection their brave lives of strife, striving, and struggle.
Rather different, that, from provoking a nascent Second Great Depression through willful ignorance and administrative malpractice, forcing uncounted have-nots to “have not” their very lives. I’ve known the type since I was four, in the school yard: the cruel, blustering blowhard-bully. He is, in terms of impact, the single worst person on the face of this, the Earth he daily endangers. Absent from this non-Leader of the Free World is every trait Steinbeck’s work models: compassion, empathy, kindness, goodness, decency, integrity, fidelity, intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, authenticity, principledness, conscience, conscientiousness, gravitas, wisdom, welcome, and courage.
The MAGA movement has co-opted and grotesquely perverted both the word and the meaning of “populism.” With this show, I’m determined to do my part in calling out The Big Lie and redeeming populism for the people actually in need of—indeed, long overdue for—empowerment through unity of purpose.
Neither a Communist nor even a far-left firebrand, the center-left, proto-feminist, egalitarian Steinbeck advocated not armed political revolution but an ethical evolution that would yield sweeping collective action within the system, in order to transform it. I believe he would've admired and aligned himself with the likes of Secretary Hillary Clinton, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and the current actual Leader of the Free World, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Would that he were alive today!—but he can he, through those who read his work and bring his values to bear in confronting the evil that stains and debases the highest office in our land.
Describe your performance. What is the performative aspect of the production? Are you playing characters in dialogue with each other? Will there be costumes and sets?
As opposed to Shepard’s Fool for Love, of which Megan and I present full-on theatrical performances, this is a show in which we split the difference between a stage play and a dramatic reading with-socio-literary analysis. She and I co-narrate the expository passages, and we split up the dialogue according to gender; in the case of our two-man scene from Of Mice and Men, our respective sizes have her playing George and me the “gentle giant,” Lennie.
This not being full-on theater, we use only a handful of props, a few hats, and a scarf or two. No sets; just a shared brick wall—assuming that, by June 5, Illinois’ social-distancing guidelines will permit us to perform within a single space. If not, then we’ll have to do as we’ve done lately for our three-part Shakespeare show’s Antony and Cleopatra excerpt—ironically, the “reunion scene”: enact it five miles away from each other. Certainly, our renditions of both Bruce Springsteen’s Grapes of Wrath-inspired “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and X’s [John Doe & Exene Cervenka’s] Cannery Row-themed “Delta 88 Nightmare” will be much easier to play, and will play much better, if Megan [guitar and lead vocal] and I [bass, harmonica, backup vocal] are just a couple of yards, rather than a city, apart!
The solo version has provoked lively post-show Q&A-based conversations. I anticipate a fascinating virtual dialogue between Megan, me, one rep each from our three heroic host organizations, and whoever in our online audience calls in.
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Paul, you’ve done Steinbeck solo. Why a duo this time?
On the most practical level, it’s easier to portray only the male Joads in a scene from The Grapes of Wrath, while someone else tackles Ma and Rose of Sharon. And I can assay a much better Lennie in Of Mice and Men if not constantly having to switch back and forth between him and George.
That said, I doubt I’d have chosen to adapt the show for a duo if not for Megan's and my having logged four successful years as performance-partners, the June 5 show marking—to the week, I believe!—the kickoff of our fifth year. As we’ve “co-tackled” Shakespeare, Sam Shepard, A.R. Gurney and others, in theaters and cabarets and learning-in-retirement programs and at Racine Correctional Institute, I’ve witnessed firsthand this committed young actor-musician’s great range, presence, and talent—all of which elevate my own dramatic and musical performances, every time. Recently, I publicly presented Megan with a “Best Actor With Whom I've Ever Worked” trophy—something that, in my 45 years of stage work, I’d never done the likes of before. Granted, I’m not objective on this, but I believe we have extraordinary onstage chemistry.
Corse adds, “John Steinbeck’s character work is fascinating. His stories focus on the people in life who most of us overlook. Hard economic times always hit the poorest the hardest; they’re faced with the gravest challenges. Someone with mental illness is looked upon as an ‘other’ that threatens humanity, rather than as a person who needs understanding, patience and care. Then there's the hard truths of race and hatred in this country, that still permeate today. These are who Steinbeck brings to the forefront. Reading his work, it ‘feels’ like a lot of things are better today, but given the current climate, I now think the same issues are still there, they were just hidden better."
