Theater Review—

Even The Playbill For Steinbeck

At Westport Is Great

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Probably everyone in America is familiar with John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men — certainly every kid in Newtown reads it by ninth grade. It is one of the saddest stories ever written, and thus it is appropriate to have it staged now at the Westport Country Playhouse, where it was to have been directed by the late Paul Newman, before illness forced him to step aside. The awareness of that fact, as much as the audience’s foreknowledge of the ending, makes it all the more powerfully moving.

For anyone not familiar with the work, it tells of George and Lennie, itinerant ranch hands in northern California during the Great Depression. They are a strange pair: George is edgy, smart but bitter over the economic hard times in which they live. Lennie is an amiable giant, with the mind of a small child. George tells strangers that Lennie was kicked in the head by a mule when he was a boy, but in fact he was born “simple,” abandoned by his mother, and raised by his elderly “Aunt Clara.”

When she died, George kept his promise to look after Lennie, and they have traveled together ever since. They take jobs where Lennie’s prodigious strength wins approval, until his tendency to pat and squeeze things that he thinks are soft and “purty” (like mice or young women) force them to flee.

It is a hard and lonely life, a routine of endless poverty, subjection to the whims of bosses, and sojourns in strange, harsh bunkhouses. But George and Lennie have one thing going for them: they have a dream.

In a litany that begins “Guys like us are the loneliest guys in the world,” George enthralls Lennie with the explanation of how they are different: they have each other, and instead of wasting their wages on booze and hookers the way the other hands do, they are saving up a stake that will enable them to buy their own little spread. The plan is to have 11 acres, with room for chickens and pigs and a cow, and fruit trees and a vegetable garden… (“and rabbits, George, don’t forget the rabbits!”).

They’ll be their own bosses. If they want to take a day off to go to a ball game, or to listen to the rain on the roof, or to have a friend stay over, they can do it…

It’s Lennie’s favorite story, the one George uses to calm him when he gets anxious or frightened. When they settle into the new bunkhouse where they hope to stay for a couple of months, it seems like this could be a path to the realization of the dream.

Lennie’s hard work wins the approval of the crew chief. Candy, the old man who cleans the rooms, listens to George’s description and offers his life savings for the chance to go in with them.

But as the poet Robert Burns wrote, “the best laid plans of mice and men go oft agley, and leave us naught but sorrow and woe…” and the play moves toward its inevitable climax.

Michael Yeargan’s scenic design and Robert Wierzel’s lighting combine to capture both the abstract beauty of a water hole at sunset, and the grimy interior of a men’s bunkhouse.

The actors do well in their portrayal of the isolation of these depression era drifters. Brian Hutchison invests George with proletarian dignity and decency. Mark Mineart does a fine job with the hulking child-man, Lennie. Rafael Sardina is angry and frustrated as the boss’s son, Curly, jealous of the pretty new wife he can’t control, and suspicious of every man on the place. Betsy Morgan combines the manner of a flirtatious slut with the desperate plea for attention in a place where she has no one to talk to.

Edward Seamon radiates pathos as Candy. Sean Patrick Reilly captures the bleak loneliness of all the men when he describes the attractions of the local brothel that has “real nice chairs” that you are allowed to sit on, just like you lived in a place with chairs like that.

Matthew Montelongo is stalwartly decent as the crew chief, who is one step up the ladder from the other hands, but who treats them kindly. Kene Holliday is Crooks, the lone black man, who, because of his race, is shut out even from the crude fellowship of the bunkhouse.

Tommy Nohilly is the meanest of the men. When he bullies Candy into letting him shoot the old man’s dog, because it is old and smelly (much like its master) the audience flinches with the other actors as they wait for the sound of the gun.

One other thing: The playbill contains an essay by David Wiltse, putting John Steinbeck into perspective, as he describes what constitutes a classic. It is absolutely the best thing I have ever read in a playbill.

(Performances continue to November 1. Visit WestportPlayhouse.org or call 203-227-4177 for the performance schedule, ticket prices and reservations.)