Doctorow's "The March" Marching to the Stage

Steppenwolf Theater Company is Chicago is to mount a production of E.L. Doctorow's prize-winning Civil War novel about General Sherman's march to the sea.

From an article in the New York Times...

Mr. Galati is writing the script of “The March” and will also direct the production, which is scheduled to run April 5-June 10, 2012. Like the award-winning 2005 novel, the play renders Sherman’s march through the South during the final months of the Civil War, as told by a range of characters — Union and Confederate soldiers, slaves and free men, women of various life stations, and, at the center of it all, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

The actor and Steppenwolf ensemble member William Petersen (best known from his years as Gil Grissom on the CBS series “CSI”) will play Sherman. Among the other actors in the production will be Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s artistic director, who will play Mrs. Sherman and several other minor roles.

In the two decades since “The Grapes of Wrath,” Mr. Galati has written stage adaptations of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and Haruki Murakami’s novels “Kafka on the Shore” and “After the Quake.” On Broadway he directed the 1998 original musical production of “Ragtime,” based on another work of historical fiction by Mr. Doctorow (that script was written by Terrence McNally) as well as the musicals “Seussical” and “The Pirate Queen.”