Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors broadside advertising Bitter Harvest

Censorship can take many forms. Apart from banning and challenging books, limiting the access of specific communities to books and cultural events is also a form of censorship. Historically, poorer communities have had very restricted access to storytelling and cultural events, largely due to the often high cost of joining a theater’s, dance company’s, or orchestra’s audience. Serving working-class urban and rural communities, Indigenous reservations and incarcerated persons, the New York Street Theater Caravan (NYSTC) theater company ensured that stories like the one in Bitter Harvest, their play adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was accessible to these communities.

Lincoln Center’s Out-of-Doors programming was free for all audiences, and the 1975 season included numerous other street theater companies performing titles such as Summer Cycle, Fool’s Play, and Ain’t I a Woman. Bringing Bitter Harvest to Lincoln Center’s audience, in a city defined by its immigrant and migrant population, NYSTC was able to connect with these theatergoers on themes that John Steinbeck had written about 36 years earlier. With hindsight, knowing the book censorship that that has continued long after Steinbeck, the words of Gretchen Knief, the Kern County, California, librarian where The Grapes of Wrath was banned, were prescient: "If that book is banned today, what book will be banned tomorrow?"