Above: before (to the left) and after (to the right) I got "all up" in the truck.

     At some point during the run-up to producing The Grapes of Wrath, the question of the truck came up.  I mean, it's nearly another character and the Joads had to have their beat-up truck to make their journey in, or it wouldn't be the same story would it?  We were going to install a trough to act as a river, we were going to have rain, so we had to have a truck.  

     Someone found a truck from a recent production at Dartmouth (I think it was Dartmouth), and arrangements were made to buy that one.  So a Penske was rented and the ATD and a carpenter went North to pick up the truck.  They got back to the shop late one night, and we hauled it off to plonk it down just inside the door.  It would need some amendments anyway as it was too long to fit off stage before its initial appearance in the show, which meant that something like five feet of the thing had to "go," and even then, the bed wound up being articulated so that it was shorter still such that it could hide behind a black Kabuki panel.

     All of that would come later.  As I walked around the thing, I was frowning at the way the cab looked.  There was that "something" about it that wasn't quite right.  The tires were made of semi-rigid large diameter ribbed plastic tubing, which actually worked pretty well.  The wheels look nice.  There was even an Oklahoma license plate that I had to touch to note that it was only a print on Masonite.

     But the cab structure!  It just bugged me.  

     I said "I'm gonna' fix this."  And that turned into quite a number of days of work, even as the shop was dismantled (lost our lease!), stuff got moved, we put up some large tents behind the theatre building and moved the shop in there.   I kept on working.  Glad I did it, though.

     There were some things that didn't change, like the radiator grill, and the shape of the frame that held it all together, but in taking it apart I saw a problem with that framing: it was built like scenery, like a welding project, not like an automobile.  Reflecting on this at the time, I supposed that there were no automotive technologists at Dartmouth to advise otherwise.  If it had had a single frame with parts stuck on top, like an automobile, then the body parts could have been removed and altered, the frame shorted, and then the body parts replaced.  But it was actually built like three boxes  welded together and skinned -- as scenery usually is -- which meant that to shorten it, two of those boxes needed to be cut (the bed and the cab) length removed, and then welded back into a whole piece.

     I'm not a welder, so that I left to the carpenters.  In the meantime, I stripped all the details that were not "truck enough" for me, and commenced redoing the fenders, the radiator housing, the -- most of the front end detail.  The fenders were actually the first things that I saw were "just wrong:" they were attached straight to the engine housing, instead of splaying off of it.  I cut struts to hold new fenders away from the body, then sheathed over it in Masonite and sheet metal.   I had never done sheet metal work like that either, so it was interesting cutting, fitting, and then driving a couple boxes worth of sheet metal screws.

     At some point the TD told Marion, the designer, what I was up to, and she was -- rightfully so -- upset that I had just gone and done it without her input.  Sorry, Marion.  I did apologize.  However, when she had a look at what I had done, she conceded.  I'm not celebrating my having gone "rogue scenic" here, but if we had waited there likely wouldn't have been time to do it even close to right.

     Why bother?  Because the first half of the 20th Century is a favorite historical period of mine, and when I saw the truck "as is" when we bought it, I knew it would not be up to the level of expectation for the company.  If I hadn't bothered, it would have bugged me the whole time, and just a fresh coat of paint would not solve the problems with its appearance.

      Portrait of a craftsman in his tent behind the theatre.  Oy.  After the bed and the cab got shorter, I built a new bench seat to replace the box that had been there; I built a new roof and covered it in fabric like it should have been (seen in the last image above with all the clamps); I added sheet metal louvers to the engine housing; the headlights were mounted on a rail (as seen in the portrait); I added a flare to the body where the cab met the engine housing; I added a hinge down the middle of the engine housing, so that the hood panels looked like they were two halves -- like it should have been; I added brake drums on the back and housings for the steering joints on the front; I added link rods; plus some Bondo work, and a fresh coat of paint.  I didn't change the wheels and tires.

     It was when it came time to get the thing into a working position on stage that it was found that the bed was still about three feet too long to fit where it was needed to hide.  The decision was made to articulate it, and the ATD spent the better part of the day trying to weld hinges in place to allow that.  Sadly, we couldn't get hinges that would take a weld.  I suggested welding extra pieces of steel on the outside of the bed frame through which bolts could be shot, effectively making a hinge point.  That worked.  The wheels projected too much, too, so that became part of the action: the actors brought the truck on stage, swung the bed down, put the wheels on, and then the stakes on the sides of the bed.  Then they loaded up to move to California. Whoof.

     I forgot: I added a differential and a drive shaft, too.  A goodly portion of the audience would see the truck from a vantage like that of the photograph above, and if we were going to have cables hanging from telephone poles that had insulators in forced perspective, then I was going to put a differential on the rear axle!  O.K., all that undercarriage work may have been a bit overboard, but I still believe that if such details had not been there, the audience would have noticed something off about it, even if they didn't know why.  And that's a question I wanted a better answer to.  So, yeah, differential and drive shaft.  I think I installed a transmission case, too, though I don't have a photograph of that.

     That the whole thing hovered a couple inches off the floor I just had to let go.  I mean, pick your battles, right?   I also knew that asking for that to be amended just wasn't going to happen.

     Was it perfect?  Nah, I knew it wasn't, that it really couldn't be.  Had we started from scratch, maybe it could have been some better, but who knows?  It was as good as I and anyone else was going to get it.  It was better than it was, and it fit in with the rest of the design, still overtly theatrical, and that's O.K.  I mean, forced perspective telephone poles?

     The only thing I didn't do "new" was add a manufacturer.  "Woodsmobile?"

     I did keep the original license plates.

     The Eurydice Columns

     Photos: R. Jake Wood.