A more streamlined festival still offers plenty of entry into the work and life of John Steinbeck.

The opening night barbecue of the Steinbeck Festival will occupy a stunning setting at the Big Sur Land Trust property Mark’s Ranch. It will include food from Oldtown Deli’s Gordon Chin and live music by fiddler Benny Young. But it’s a theatrical performance of excerpts from The Pastures of Heaven by Western Stage – and a talk with its famous playwright, Octavio Solis – that will best get at the mission of this 33rd edition of the festival.


John Steinbeck’s 1932 eponymous short story-cycle collection, The Pastures of Heaven, opens on a prologue at the “Carmelo Mission” in 1776. A group of 20 “converted Indians” escape from a work detail and hide out in a canyon in Carmel Valley, only to be be tracked down by a Spanish military detail, chained together, and marched back. Along the way, one soldier sets off on horseback to chase down a deer, which leads him to a “long valley floored with green pasturage,” Steinbeck writes.


“The disciplinarian corporal felt weak in the face of so serene a beauty. He who had whipped brown back to tatters, he whose rapacious manhood was building a new race for California, this bearded, savage bearer of civilization slipped from his saddle and took off his steel hat.


‘Holy Mother!’ he whispered. ‘Here are the green pastures of Heaven.’”


Steinbeck’s corporal names his “discovery” Las Pasturas del Cielo – The Pastures of Heaven. The corporal is based on a real person enacting a real incident – the “Indians” were Rumsen – and today we know the valley as Corral de Tierra. The short stories that follow, about farming and ranching families in the valley, are connected by the land, by a family named the Munroes, and by a curse that Steinbeck seems to suggest was born with the disgrace of tyrannizing native people and taking nature by violence, all in the name of God.


But that’s not the way Solis sees it.


“The Pastures of Heaven is not Eden,” he says. “It’s a metaphor for California, a prophetic metaphor. People have been coming here to make their dreams happen since before the Gold Rush… California has power over the American psyche.”


Solis wrote his adaptation for theatrical company Word 4 Word, which transcribes every word of short works.


“It’s super faithful,” Solis says, “Every ‘and,’ ‘the’ and ‘but’ is in the play… .I turned one of the stories into a song, a corrido. And I wrote my own coda.


“The characters share a common thread – delusion. They come into the valley, imagine they can start anew, that the land can redeem them. It can’t.”


Solis visited Steinbeck’s fabled Corral de Tierra (he trespassed to get a look), and found the place very different.


“There are wineries, golf courses,” he says. “They’re the gentry. They’re not the workers Steinbeck was attracted to.”


The charge of the festival, then, is to conjure in the imagination the home Steinbeck wrote about, though it may no longer exist. A tour of Oldtown Salinas, for instance, will stop by the site of the magnificent Cominos Hotel, where presidents and dignitaries stayed, where the California Rodeo and Salinas’ rise as the county’s seat were established. It was 105 years old when it was razed after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Today it is the parking lot across from the Steinbeck Center.


“We want to make sure this celebration of home and Salinas is true to the history of Salinas,” says Elizabeth Welden-Smith, the Steinbeck Center’s curator of education. 


The return home is a conscious play. In years past, the festival has sprawled out over events here and concurrent celebrations from Scotland to Egypt to Russia. This year’s more manageable line-up aims to ground the world-traveled writer here. One reason for that, says Welden-Smith, is that they are marshaling their resources for a big, national campaign next year for the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath.


“It’s like a Big Read, but a mega Big Read,” she says. 


The festival, which runs Friday through Sunday, has tours of Oldtown (1pm Fri, 2:30pm Sun) and Monterey County (1:30pm Sat) locales in which Steinbeck set many of his books, plus presentations by Gavin Cologne-Brookes, professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University in England, (10:30am Sat; for a Q&A with Cologne-Brookes, go to www.mcweekly.com). It includes an oral history panel facilitated by former Salinas mayor Dennis Donohue (1pm Sun). The Books and Beers by the Bay (6-8pm Sat) at the C Restaurant on Cannery Row marries more than 20 beers – North Coast, Anchor Steam, Peter B’s, Firestone, Shipyard – and Clement Chef Jerry Regester’s Steinbeck-themed appetizers to a sunset tour of Ed Ricketts Lab. In his prime, Steinbeck would be at this party.


There are films like Harvest of Empire, about U.S. intervention in Latin America and its effect on today’s immigration (2pm Sat, 11am and 2pm Sun); two art based on Salinas; and the inclusive Community Free Day with performances by SpectorDance and Youth Orchestra Salinas (3-5pm Sun).


Each will stir inspiration in audiences. And each will bring Steinbeck home, in more ways than one, figuratively and literally, before his big trip next year. 


THE 33RD STEINBECK FESTIVAL 
takes place Friday-Sunday, at the National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main St., Salinas, and other locations. Events range from free to $75 ($175 for Saturday all day). 775-4721, www.steinbeck.org