NEW YORK — Frank Galati, an actor, director, teacher and adapter who was a pivotal figure in Chicago’s theater community and a two-time Tony Award winner, died Monday, according to Steppenwolf Theatre. He was 79.
Galati won twin Tonys in 1990 — best play and best director — for his adaptation and staging of Steppenwolf’s production of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” starring Gary Sinise as Tom Joad. He was also nominated for directing the 1998 celebrated musical “Ragtime.”
“Every actor will know what I mean when I say that Frank waited for me. He waited for me. He cast you and then he trusted you. Sometimes he knew me as an actor better than I knew myself,” said Steppenwolf member Molly Regan.
His screenwriting credits include “The Accidental Tourist,” for which he was an Oscar nominee. He also was credited for writing the teleplay to Arthur Miller’s play “The American Clock” in 1993.
He had highs but also lows on Broadway, including watching his production of “The Pirate Queen” be shipwrecked by blistering reviews and become one of Broadway’s costliest flops in 2007 and being fired in 2001 as director of “Seussical.”
Galati became a Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member in 1985 and the Goodman Theatre’s associate director a year later. He remained in that post until 2008. He was also an artistic associate at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida.
In a joint statement, Steppenwolf’s co-artistic directors Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis paid tribute to Galati: “Frank had a profound impact on Steppenwolf, and all of us, over the years. For some, he was a teacher, mentor, director, adaptor, writer, fellow actor, and visionary. Regardless of the relationship, Frank always made others feel cared for, valued, and inspired in his ever-generous, joyful and compassionate presence.”
His productions at the Goodman include “The Visit,” “She Always Said Pablo,” “The Winter’s Tale,” “The Good Person of Setzuan” and “Cry the Beloved Country.” He most recently directed Asolo Repertory Theatre’s 2022 world premiere musical “Knoxville,” written by the “Ragtime” team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.
Galati’s long career also included directing at the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, as well as teaching performance study at Northwestern University for nearly 40 years.
“He seems to have five productions going at once, major ones, always juggling, always busy, always thrilled to be doing them all,” Sinise told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. “I’ve asked him several times how he does it, and he says he doesn’t know.”
Galati won several Joseph Jefferson Awards for outstanding achievements in Chicago theater, as well as two directing awards from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, a League of Chicago Theatres Artistic Leadership Award and an NAACP Theatre Award.
“You won’t find one of us who was fortunate enough to work with him who wasn’t changed by him. He made us all better and there will never be another one like him,” said Steppenwolf member and Broadway director Anna D. Shapiro.
He is survived by his husband, Peter Amster, also a theater director.
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Lee Jones is a farmer in Huron, Ohio. He’s also a devotee of John Steinbeck, whose depression-era masterpiece “Grapes of Wrath” sang to him of soils robbed of value and people robbed of homes and livelihoods.
1938: A farm in the dustbowl of Colorado. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)
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Today, Jones and his 400-acre “Chef’s Garden” farm and state of the art culinary school on the banks of Lake Erie are the toast of Michelin star chefs. But around 40 years ago, when he was just shy of age 20, the Jones family experienced how climate and the economy can destroy a business. In 1983, hundreds of acres of Jones Farm fresh market vegetables were crushed in an unprecedented rain of hail. The avalanche of debt that followed at 22 percent interest rates smothered the business almost to death. The bank took their home and land and they moved into a 150-year-old house with a leaky ceiling and curtains for doors. They rebuilt their growing acreage in small rented parcels, selling goods from the back of farm trucks and station wagons. Farm life is tough, but this was next-level.
Farmer Lee Jones has set a high standard for regenerative farming with his 400-acre “Chef’s Garden” … [+] business in Huron, Ohio.
Louise L. Schiavone
It was at that point that Lee Jones understood firsthand how the ravages of climate, bad agricultural practices, unrelenting monoculture – in this case, cotton crops – and systemic financial depression made life hell on the 1930’s American prairies.
“The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke…The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the blackening sky.” John Steinbeck, 1939, Grapes of Wrath.
The Dust Bowl with its searing droughts, blinding black storms of not rain but mocking dry dusty soil is almost a hundred years in the rear-view mirror. Ultimately, the story of American agriculture was re-set through aggressive New Deal conservation and agriculture programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who famously told American governors in 1937, “the nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” Also helpful, a changing climate cycle.
(Original Caption) 10/24/1932 -Atlanta, GA- Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York has stressed … [+] helping the farmer in quite a few of his campaign speeches, and here he is getting first-hand information and shaking hands with men of the soil near Atlanta, GA. BPA2# 79
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What gives us hope about nature is that there are cycles. And what makes us fearful about nature is that there are cycles. And while the science, machinery, and now technology of farming have leapt into the 21st century, so have the brutal environmental realities. These are the challenges of planet earth in 2022. The vise of rapacious farming practices, climate change, a deadly pandemic, inflation, and war has hundreds of millions of people on the planet in a chokehold.
People wait for water with containers at a camp, one of the 500 camps for internally displaced … [+] persons (IDPs) in town, in Baidoa, Somalia, on February 13, 2022. Insufficient rainfall since late 2020 has come as a fatal blow to populations already suffering from a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic. For several weeks, humanitarian organizations have multiplied alerts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, which raises fears of a tragedy similar to that of 2011, the last famine that killed 260,000 people in Somalia. – Desperate, hungry and thirsty, more and more people are flocking to Baidoa from rural areas of southern Somalia, one of the regions hardest hit by the drought that is engulfing the Horn of Africa. (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP) (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
That is why agriculture is in hot focus at this juncture in history and the degraded condition of soils globally is sharing the stage as political leaders, environment ministers, advocates, and climate-focused organizations of all kinds convene in Egypt for the COP27 summit.
President Joe Biden speaks at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Friday, Nov. 11, 2022, in Sharm … [+] el-Sheikh, Egypt. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
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The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports the world faces its greatest crisis in modern history, with as many as 50 million people on the verge of famine.
Global organizations agree that feeding the hungry is the shared moral responsibility of affluent nations. At the same time these nations themselves are facing a reckoning of climate extremes and radically depleted soil quality, says Ronald Vargas, Secretary of the FAO’s Global Soils Partnership.
Ronald Vargas, Global Soil Partnership Secretariat, FAO
Ronald Vargas
When governments and activists talk about environmental quality, Vargas observes, they refer to air quality and water quality. But rarely will they include soil quality or soil health. Yet, he says, “the interface between air and water is soils. With the Dust Bowl, for example, the soil rose to the atmosphere. If your soil is polluted with heavy metals, or the remnants of pesticides, or other materials, these contaminants will also be found in the air. And water quality depends on the soils.”
Astoria, N.Y.: Photo of PPE gloves and surgical masks improperly disposed of on sidewalks and … [+] streets in Astoria, New York on April 12, 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Newsday RM via Getty Images),
Newsday via Getty Images
Today, aggravating an already bad situation is the onslaught of Covid19 pandemic-era plastics for a multitude of health equipment. At the same time, the food packaging that has kept restaurants alive has kept microplastics percolating in the atmosphere. “These contaminants are everywhere,” says Vargas. “Where are the masks and packaging ending up? In the soils. And in many countries, waste management is not adequate. Those particles of microplastic go into the soil, from there they go to the air, and then they go to the water. “
Sustainable farming practices that give to, rather than take from, the soil are critically in demand, says Vargas. And the question, will there be enough calories to consume? is very different from the question: will there be enough healthy food to eat?
The 400-acre regeneratively farmed Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio,
Louise L. Schiavone
What is in the soil is the difference between boom and bust for Lee Jones, a purveyor
Miniature root vegetables cultivated exclusively for five-star tables.
Louise L. Schiavone
of top quality vegetables to best-of-the-best restaurants, and now to consumers online. Emerging from the near ruin of their farm business almost four decades ago, the Jones family learned there was an opportunity to do better by nature and, as a result, better by consumers. Since then, Jones has engaged a staff of farmworkers, packagers, managers, scientists and a resident chef to curate his crops. He’s cultivated a network of demanding star chefs who have inspired him to develop unique,
Executive Chef Jamie Simpson, Culinary Vegetable Institute, The Chef’s Garden.
Louise L. Schiavone
regeneratively grown produce: golden zucchini blossoms, miniature squash, delicate carrots of multiple colors, tomatoes and cucumbers of myriad colors, sizes and flavors, cauliflowers, lettuces and root vegetables in a rainbow of colors, and much more.
“It’s the farmer’s goal to leave the land in better condition for future generations,” says Jones. “We’ve added to that. We believe that a farm needs to have healthy soil, grow healthy food, feed healthy people, in a healthy environment. My dad had a saying – ‘We’re just trying to get as good at what we’re doing as the growers were a hundred years ago.’”
The Chef’s Garden fields are fertilized through strips of clover and other small growth, established between rows of plants, drawing nutrients from the sun and pulling them into the soil for the larger harvest. Composted plants and grasses protect the base of plants along each row. And the rhythm of farming is geared to restoring the soils, as opposed to the ravages of big-business mono-culture.
Leafy harvest, The Chef’s Garden.
Louise L. Schiavone
On his 400-acre farm, Jones keeps 200 acres planted with undemanding cover crops to harvest the sun’s energy. The other half is for crops to take to market. The two segments are rotated every year. Jones won’t say his produce is organic, strictly, because – even though chemical fertilizers and pesticides are avoided at most costs – if a chemical product can save a crop, it will be used.
In his signature daily outfit of blue overalls, white oxford shirt, and red bow tie, Lee Jones is expressing a solidarity with farmers who struggle and endure, and saluting those who have gone before, like the working people Steinbeck depicted in “Grapes of Wrath.”
Baby lettuces ready for planting, The Chef’s Garden, Huron, Ohio.
Louise L. Schiavone
Jones knows he is just one farmer working a few hundred acres on a planet where only 38 percent of the land can be farmed. For him, it is “one step” in the shared human agricultural “journey of a thousand miles,” but well worth the passion.
NEW YORK — Decades ago, as communists and suspected communists were being blacklisted and debates spread over the future of American democracy, John Steinbeck — a resident of Paris at the time — often found himself asked about the headlines from his native country.
The question he kept hearing: “What about McCarthyism?”
The future Nobel Laureate wrote that the practice embodied by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was “simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged.”
“It is the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law,” Steinbeck continued in a 1954 column for Le Figaro that had rarely been seen until it was reprinted this week in the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. “We have always had this latent thing. All democracies have it. It cannot be wiped out because, by destroying it, democracy would destroy itself.”
Steinbeck was closely associated with his native California, the setting for all or most of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Of Mice and Men” and other fiction. But he lived briefly in Paris in the mid-1950s and wrote a series of short pieces for Le Figaro that were translated into French.
Most of his observations were humorous reflections on his adopted city, but at times he couldn’t help commenting on larger matters.
“Anyone even remotely familiar with Steinbeck’s works knows that he never shied away from taking on controversial topics,” Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, writes in a brief introduction. The Strand has unearthed obscure works by Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others. Gulli calls Steinbeck’s column in the French publication a timely work for current concerns about democracy.
“The Grapes of Wrath” was a defining work of the Great Depression. Steinbeck held to an idealistic liberalism that was formed in part in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, deepened by the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and eventually tested by the Vietnam War. He despised both McCarthyism and communism, opposing what he called “any interference with the creative mind” — whether censorship in the U.S. or the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union.
“He stated in the 1960s that the role of an artist was to critique his country,” says Susan Shillinglaw, who directs the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.
Steinbeck believed that the United States was a force for good and fortunate in its ability to correct itself. He advocated a version of tough love hard to defend now, likening democracy to a child who “must be hurt constantly” to endure and regarding McCarthyism as a passing threat that would strengthen the country in the long run.
“In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak,” he wrote.
McCarthyism was peaking around the time of Steinbeck’s column and McCarthy himself would be censured by his Senate peers within months and dead by 1957. Political historian Julian Zelizer says that Steinbeck was not alone in recognizing the dangers of anti-communist hysteria, while maintaining an “unyielding optimism” that “the constitutional separation of powers and pluralism would keep these forces on the margins.”
Lucan Way, whose books include “Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics,” tells The Associated Press that “in principle the clear and unambiguous defeat of anti-democratic actors” such as McCarthy might have a positive effect.
But he does not think Steinbeck’s column can be applied to contemporary politics.
“What is going on now is not an example of this phenomenon (the fall of McCarthyism),” Way says. “Trumpism has not been clearly defeated but has instead helped to normalize anti-democratic behavior that was previously considered out of bounds.”
