With a cast of over thirty UCF guest artists, faculty, staff, alumni and students, the School of Performing Arts is proud to present a reading of Frank Galati’s 1990 Tony Award winning adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Renowned first as a novel, and then as a prize-winning motion picture, the story of the Joad family and their flight from the dust bowl of Oklahoma is familiar to all. Desperately proud, but reduced to poverty by the loss of their farm, the Joads pile their few possessions on a battered old truck and head west for California, hoping to find work and a better life. Despite the anguish and suffering that it depicts, the play becomes in the final essence, a soaring and deeply moving affirmation of the indomitability of the human spirit and of the essential goodness and strength that—then and now—resides in the hearts and minds of the “common man,” throughout the world.