John Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be the book of his life. He planned to set down the story of his own personal origins for his two sons, and he meant that both literally and cosmically. Originally he called the book My Valley, and he intended it to unfold in alternating chapters that cut between his mother’s family, the Hamiltons, who arrived in California’s Salinas Valley from Ireland in the late 1800s, and their fictional neighbors, the Trasks, who embodied what he called “the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.” (As if this weren’t clear enough, two generations of Trask sons have the initials “A” and “C”; if you know your Bible, you know which ones the fathers love better and how the others feel about it.)

In his adaptation, Galati tried to find what Kinney, who directs, calls “the driving force, the emotional character of the book.” There was a lot of cutting; the play begins with a scene that’s on page 218 in the book. (Which, they point out, is more than 200 pages earlier than the 1955 James Dean movie.) There’s also an emphasis on Lee, the Trasks’ Chinese cook, who Galati calls “the moral and spiritual center of the story. He’s plainspoken but a poetic thinker. He asks the big, big questions.”

FG: It was years before I found out my sister resented the fact that our parents and uncle and grandmother called her Sissy. That attached her to me, identified her as my sister instead of herself. It took 50 years.

TK: I saw last night this Steinbeck quote, “Now stop trying to be perfect and be good.” It made me think of Cal’s narcissism, like, “Oh, I did it, I did it [killed my brother],” thrashing around and punishing himself for his natural impulse to be a fully rounded human being.

FG: And you’re brilliant at it. I read in a book about Joseph Campbell that you must feed myth with your own blood. Not until you embody it, literally embody it, that myth is where it is. It’s not a fairy tale, it’s not a moral, it’s a lived action.

TK: The character of Cathy—we approach her as a person who wants something. She wants to protect herself from harm. It’s an American story, and a western story to boot. As Paul Schrader said, in the east, a man who is depressed opens a window and jumps out. In the west, he opens the window and shoots. Cathy is a turn-of-the-century Taxi Driver. I hope people feel something for her when she talks about Alice in Wonderland, sneaking past Alice. She’s not small, she’s invisible. It’s a great joy for her to picture herself diminished and the pain she caused everywhere else. There’s that connective tissue again. Each of us is capable of the same thing.