Brute Strength

By Stefan Kanfer

OF MICE AND MEN

by JOHN STEINBECK

"Tell me again about the rabbits, George." The plea is from John Steinbeck's naturalistic opus Of Mice and Men. The pleader is Lennie, a ruined hulk who grasps ideas with his hands instead of his brain. Looming about the California farm land, Lennie is barely held in tow by his keeper George. Together, the two migratory workers enjoy a classic symbiosis, the blending of brute strength and animal cunning.

When this play was first produced in the '30s, the Natural Man enjoyed something of a vogue. Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape, Hemingway's grunting heroes and Steinbeck's wretched Okies were the common components of tragedy. But even milestones can erode with the years and weather. Depression America is not Recession America; economic determinism is no longer in literary style. The ranch hands who surround George and Lennie are types rather than characters, and the stagecraft contains all the ungainly devices of yesteryear: the breathless entrances, the lamplit confessionals, the contrived pathos that redeems criminal actions.

Black and White. Given these constraints, Director Edwin Sherin (The Great White Hope) has worked something of a miracle. His cast might be a repertory group. Performers work at peak level; if Stefan Gierasch is to be singled out for excellence, it is not because he is better but because his crippled old ranch hand is written as operatic bathos and yet is played with unfailing dignity and wit.

But the greatest honors belong to the two leads. Kevin Conway informs his character with contemporary insights. His blustery tantrums never quite conceal a fear of isolation that only Lennie's undemanding presence can assuage. James Earl Jones gives the most restrained and, paradoxically, the most forceful performance of his career as Lennie. Lolling, dribbling, crushing the life out of what he loves, Jones gives his burdened oaf a soul that more than compensates for his damaged mind.

When a cast is racially integrated, it has been the custom of audiences to pretend that nothing has happened, or to infer that the millennium has arrived. Nonsense. A mixture of black and white can sometimes disturb the texture of a play, as in Odyssey. Or it can enrich the work, as it does in Pippin. In Of Mice and Men, it grants the play a fresh resonance. The interdependence of George and Lennie is far more poignant and tragic than in the original. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the play would have been producible in the old style (a 1968 TV revival with Nicol Williamson and George Segal was two hours of dead air). Matters have reversed themselves since Steinbeck's day, when words were the masters of the stage. Today, as Conway and Jones prove, it is the singer, not the song.

sbStefan Kanfer

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