Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

• How does the new Okies’ social situation resemble that of the Joads and other migrants?
• What segment of the American population would react to the new Okies in the same way the growers and others
reacted to them during the 30s and WHY the reaction would be similar?
• What is your understanding of how the new Okies are handling their marginalized status in terms of their selfrespect
and their cohesiveness as a group?
• What is this new group of Okies doing or might/should do in order to become “legitimate” members of the
society?
• What you believe is society’s responsibility to these new Okies?
• Who might be the new Okies of 2025? Who might their antagonists be? What might happen to them?
• John Steinbeck said, “Hatred of the stranger occurs in the whole range of human history,” and his message was
that therefore we must reach out. How was this message reflected in the final scene of both the novel and the
libretto? How does the theme of the “human community” play itself out in our culture today? Is there an
increasing or decreasing sense of the “common good”? Think of specific examples to support both sides of this
issue.
(NOTE: Students might also be interested in exploring other examples of the marginalized poor such as the Minnesotans of the
Iron Range and/or the work of other socially conscious authors or song-writers who have written about their plight, e.g. Woody
Guthrie’s “on the road” songs or the ballads of Bruce Springsteen.)
activity #2
Students who are focusing on the music as well as the libretto could be asked to relate Terkel’s comments on the
musicality of the novel’s prose style to Rickey Ian Gordon’s structuring of the opera itself in terms of, for example,
• “lushness” v. “dissonance”
• contrapuntal sequencing
• the singular flowing into the plural
• the variations between the musicality of the Okies and the forces operating against them (growers, deputies, et al.)
(NOTE: In the journal he kept while writing the novel, Steinbeck says he wanted to compose the work “in a musical technique,”
trying to “use the forms and the mathematics of music rather than those of prose.” It would be “symphonic” in “composition,
in movement, in tone and in scope.” Students working with the music might wish to discuss how the structure of the libretto
fits Steinbeck’s original intentions.)
opera box lesson plans
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