A masterful staging of John Steinbeck’s poignant tale of friendship, fate, and life and times among migrant farm workers is onstage through October 26 at Fallon Theatre.
Written as a novella that would read like a play script, “Of Mice and Men,” a precursor to “Grapes of Wrath,” largely considered to be Steinbeck’s masterwork, remains on many schools’ required-reading lists among American literature classics although it also makes some banned-lists for vulgarity and for what some censors consider offensive and racist language.
Evocative of Steinbeck’s own teenage ranch-working experiences in the 1910s, the novel, which came out during the nation’s Dust Bowl days and Great Depression, was still on the best-seller lists when the play made its Broadway debut. Although it predated the Tony and Drama Desk awards, it did win the 1938 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play Award. In 2015 following its latest Broadway revival, starring James Franco and Chris O’Dowd as George and Lenny, the latter earned a Tony Award nomination for leading actor. Of the three resulting major motion pictures, the most recent, released in 1992, starred Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
The warm lighting and cozy, intimate setting on the Fallon House Theatre stage at Columbia State Historic Park almost pulls the action into the very laps of audience members sitting in the first few rows. As the story plays out to its inexorable conclusion, the consummate acting is powerful enough to counter-pull and involve every heart in the house.
As the storyline goes, two devoted childhood friends from back East are making their way to their next job on a ranch in the Salinas Valley-Soledad area having had to leave in haste from one in Weed. They are George Milton, an uneducated but intelligent and diligent man of small physical stature, and Lennie Small, a gentle, simple-minded man of towering stature and a natural strength that is in turns a boon and a curse.
The two are constantly talking about their shared aspiration of earning enough over time to buy their own small property where they can “live off the fat of the land.” It is in part because dreaming out loud about it serves as a soothing story to Lennie. While George does his best to look after his friend, Lennie’s disability in tandem with another self-soothing obsession of stroking soft things continues to be problematic.
Once at the farm, the two are introduced to Candy, Carlson and Whit, their bunkhouse mates, Slim, the muleskinner, and Crooks, black stablehand who is housed separately in the barn. They also meet the supervising Boss and Curley, his cruel, cocksure, short-statured son. Curley’s Wife, whose presence serves as a catalyst for some of the key conflicts is belittled and bullied by Curley, who also becomes a chief tormenter to Lennie after deciding he is an easy target.
Sierra Repertory Theatre (SRT) Executive Producer Scott Viets directs the cast. In the role of Lennie, Artistic Director Jerry Lee further demonstrates an extraordinary acting range that allows him to embody a role like Lennie as SRT audiences have seen him depict a host of characters ranging from romantic leads to comedic characters. Actor-director Charles Pasternak (SRT’s Macbeth, Murder on the Orient Express), who is also the Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare, depicts George as a kind of steadfast “every man” doing his best to maintain under circumstances that finds a way when they become untenable to make a Hobson’s choice for his friend.
The rest of the cast, all wonderful, are Don Bilotti (Candy); Will Block (Curley); Allie Pratt (Curley’s Wife); Shaun Carroll (Slim/Boss); Nic Folson (Crooks); Ty Smith (Carlson); Michael Gould (Whit).
“Of Mice and Men” is scheduled to play in actual repertory with the two-person play “Constellations,” also starring Lee and Pratt, through month’s end. A blog on the latter production will be shortly coming to the myMotherLode.com blog space. For more details, showtimes and to purchase tickets, visit sierrarep.org
