John Steinbeck’s seminal novel “East of Eden” looks different to Zoe Kazan from when she first read it at 15. “I think the great works of art, or the works of art that speak to us in a really personal way, do change over time,” the showrunner and writer told WWD on a Zoom call from London.
As many chapters as there are in Steinbeck’s tome, which can total around 600 pages depending on the edition, Kazan’s relationship with the novel has had its own phases too. From following Cathy Ames’ calculated journey to Adam and Charles Trasks’ “duality of good and evil” and Lee’s parental role to Cal and Aron, Kazan has seen this American parable of good and evil, Cain and Abel, over and again. Now she’ll see her vision of the story rendered on screen.
Kazan is the showrunner and writer for the Netflix limited series adaptation of “East of Eden,” a seven-part interpretation that follows the generations of the Trask family and the conflict between good, evil and choice.
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“As showrunner, you’re touching every department every day,” Kazan said. “You’re the big captain of the ship, and you’re making sure all the parts are talking to each other and making everything move forward.” It’s a responsibility Kazan’s seen firsthand as an actor of more than 20 years, knowing how vital certain elements are to a production, especially costumes for a period-set story.
“Kirsty [Cameron] did such a phenomenal job,” Kazan said of the series’ costume designer. “She worked so hard; her entire team, the people who were building all of these costumes and putting sweat stains under the arms and little things that mean so much to me, that maybe a viewer wouldn’t even notice.”
Among those details, the character Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh wearing clothes that once belonged to Alice Trask — the mother of Charles Trask, played by Mike Faist — who dies early on in the story.
Kazan and Cameron “collaborated very closely. I would see her every few days in her office, and we would go through stuff together. She had a huge challenge,” Kazan said, adding, “because no matter how much money you have on a period piece you have to really stretch those dollars, and this moves over 50 years of time. So she had to be building clothes for every period, not just for our main actors, for our background actors.”
Impressive as the Western vistas and period-specific costumes are in the adaptation, Kazan was explicit about one dictum: “Please don’t draw attention to your work.” The showrunner and writer wanted “everything to be beautiful,” of course, but the goal and intention was for each element to serve the source material. “What I wanted people to go away talking about were these characters in this story, so that they would be talking about themselves.”
It’s that self-reflection and projection Kazan found most interesting about Cathy Ames, a character the showrunner and writer has wrestled with since that first read-through of the novel at 15. “I just felt like I had never read anyone like her before,” Kazan said of Steinbeck’s infamous literary villain.
“I just was shocked by her selfishness and by her singularity of purpose and her insistence on her own agency. And it felt, to me, not connected to any political thought. She is not a feminist; she is not railing against the patriarchy. She’s literally just trying to ensure that she is in control of her own life.”
Steinbeck writes Cathy as the ultimate “monster” — someone “born without kindness or the potential of conscience,” he writes in chapter eight. “You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
Kazan’s series covers more of Steinbeck’s novel than her grandfather, filmmaker Elia Kazan’s, 1955 film starring James Dean, which mostly chronicles the latter portion of the story with characters Cal and Aron Trask.
To Kazan, Cathy isn’t solely a monster. She lies and deceives, burns her past to the ground (quite literally) and is also the victim of violence. By the end of the novel, Cathy takes her final form as Kate, an isolated, vindictive, calculated brothel madam in California’s Salinas Valley. “I think she is spending a lot of her life examining the people around her and trying to figure out what she needs to do to survive,” Kazan said.
“There is a kind of selfhood that she comes into as Kate….I think her viewpoint that the world is bad, that the world is fully evil and folly makes her isolate herself more and more. She never gains trust in any other person. I think that, for me, was the sort of key to unlocking how an insistence on self — self-determination — can become toxic to herself, not others,” Kazan said.
“As you move through the book with [Steinbeck], if you’re reading closely, he really changes his viewpoint on her, and he ends up having a lot more empathy for her, and sees her humanity, and is curious about her. I, too, went on that journey as a young reader.”
Fewer than 110 pages after his initial description of her, Steinbeck writes, “When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true,” the book reads on the first page of chapter 17. “It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.”
If there’s a thesis to Kazan’s iteration of “East of Eden,” it’s there in Steinbeck’s own writing. “This is exactly what I’ve been literally saying all day,” Kazan said, referencing the excerpt from chapter 17.
Steinbeck’s musings on his literary villain help frame Kazan’s interrogation of Cathy’s intentions and the humanity within such a complicated ensemble — assessing if actions can be judged good or evil if the justification is much more thorny.
Perhaps that’s why, more than 70 years after its initial publication, “East of Eden” and its characters still inspire such strong responses and debates on morality and amorality. “It’s bigger than good and evil,” Kazan said. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
“East of Eden” is now available to stream on Netflix.
