Acts of war
In 1864, as the tide of the Civil War started to turn against the Confederacy, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army began a campaign that led 60,000 troops on a scorched-earth march from captured Atlanta to the coastal city of Savannah, Georgia, before turning north through the Carolinas. As they went, Sherman’s troops amassed a following of freed slaves, Southern refugees and other hangers-on. The march became a massive collective organism, miles long and wide, both rapacious and transformative.
That’s the sense created in The March, E.L. Doctorow’s 2005 novel about Sherman’s campaign. As he did in 1975’s Ragtime, Doctorow passes historical circumstances through a prism of characters and events both real and fictional.
“It’s kind of like War and Peace in the way that it foregrounds and backgrounds fictional and historical characters,” Frank Galati says recently over coffee at a shop near Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he’s directing his own adaptation of Doctorow’s sprawling narrative.
Galati, 68, a longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member, is known for corralling sprawl: His 1988 44-actor adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath won him a pair of Tony Awards, while in more recent years he’s directed Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and adapted fantastical works by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Galati also has an established relationship with Doctorow, having directed the Broadway musical adaptation of Ragtime in 1997.
“Over the years since then, as his other novels have come out, I’ve always picked them up and read them with great interest,” Galati says. “When The March came out...it was the one that sort of leapt off of the page in a way and suggested, Wow, could this possibly work onstage?”
Galati, who calls Doctorow “a novelist of extraordinary genius,” says the author has been more pleased with stage versions of his novels than screen adaptations. “He was not real keen on the movie of Ragtime,” Galati says of Milos Forman’s 1981 film. “He felt that the proportions of the story were unbalanced.”
The author confirms this. “Most
films automatically take on the burden
of realism, of things actually
happening on a day-to-day basis,”
Doctorow, 81, says via e-mail. “The
novel Ragtime, for instance, does not
operate that way so the Ragtime film
loses touch with it.” The theatricality
of the stage-musical format triggers a
different reading, he says: “You know
you’re watching an art work that
begins to approximate the nature of
the novel, which is not realism but
cured up reality.”
Doctorow used plenty of primary texts in his research: “letters home, of course,” but also Gen. Sherman’s memoirs, Union Army medical manuals and lots of photographs. “It was a very well-photographed war— no action shots, but scenes of wrecked towns, dead bodies, or soldiers posing in the field.”
Doctorow’s characters—including a fair-skinned daughter of her former slave master, a socialite daughter of a Georgia Supreme Court judge,a Confederate con artist who uses the march to take up a new identity, and a host of other Yankees and rebels—will be portrayed by a 26-member cast that includes Ian Barford, Carrie Coon, Shannon Matesky and Harry Groener as Sherman himself.
“[Doctorow’s] interest in the American story, over and over again,” Galati says, “sort of plunges into the core of America’s character by bringing forth hosts of characters who are all facets of the American sensibility.”
The March is in previews now, opening Sunday 15. Steppenwolf hosts a public conversation between Doctorow and Galati, moderated by Martha Lavey, on Monday 16. See Resident companies.
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