What is the “American character?” The recently opened production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” offers one view that reflects the mood of the 1930s.
Yet another show currently running across town suggests an opposite one, only two generations later.
The play version of the novel adheres tightly to this literary classic, as it was adapted by Steinbeck himself. The story of two drifters, George (Troy Fischnaller) and his “slow” partner Lennie (Charles Leggett), voices the vanquished hopes and frustrations commonly felt in the Great Depression.
When we first meet them, the pair are on the way to new work as hired hands on a Soledad, California ranch, having narrowly escaped a mob upstate that Lennie’s hulking missteps drew. The jobs offer the latest in a string of fresh starts, although George’s efforts to protect his disadvantaged friend will inevitably and tragically fail.
It’s George and Lennie’s partnership that makes them different from their fellow ranch hands, a peculiarity that all comment on. “What’s your angle?” demands the boss (Eric Ray Anderson), certain that George is duping his charge out of his pay. Duty to another is the last motivation he can consider.
Their relationship is the lynchpin of any production, and here it does not completely convince. Leggett’s portrayal of the lumbering, childlike Lennie is adept, yet studied, accurate and sympathetic but not fully natural. As George, Fischnaller is hardened and conflicted, rising to his responsibility but resentful of it. And here lies the hole: Lennie needs George, obviously, but does George need Lennie? Fischnaller skirts it, while it must be plumbed.
Director Jerry Manning gets his talented cast to crisply articulate the play’s themes of modest dreams, from George and Lennie’s hope for a small plot of land of their own to the young Whit’s (William A. Williams) meager dream of a comfortable chair. Their wishes are as parched as Jennifer Zeyl’s scorched, inauthentically sagebrush set (note to Zeyl: cactus don’t naturally grow in the rich Salinas Valley).
Yet what leaps to the surface is the characters’ isolation, even in the close quarters of the bunkhouse, a dissolution of social bonds produced not just by hard times but by the especially American ideal of self-reliance. The pinnacle of this is, suitably, the mule-skinner Slim (Jim Gall, channeling Sam Elliott), an iconic rugged cowboy who provides a modest moral rudder. But all succumb to the same virus, including the self-involved Carlson (Ray Tagavilla), the hair-trigger jealousy of Curley (who Seanjohn Walsh offers as a swaggering buffoon), and the crippled, abandoned Candy (the magnificent Seán G. Griffin).
This makes sense in the context of the Great Depression, a time in which social bonds seemed to have dissolved in the face of economic stress. Yet the solutions of collective remedies still found friction against our self-reliant ideals -- as they still do today.
Nowhere more can this be seen than in the bitter seclusion of Crooks, the stable hand banned from the bunkhouse because he is black (meaningfully played by Teagle F. Bougere). So too for the tragic loneliness of Curley’s wife (saucy Elise Karolina Hunt), the only woman on the ranch and seen by the hands as a danger.
It’s only when Candy offers George and Lennie the real chance of making their dream of land come true that the emotional freeze begins to thaw. At last there is hope, and something to work toward. When others, like Crooks, learn of their secret, they consider joining them, but ultimately can’t offer themselves to simple faith.
It’s noteworthy that, apart from with fists, no one ever touches anyone else, with significant exception. George touches Lennie if he must, but Lennie is eager to touch. And his is the naïve touch of death, crushing mice in his eagerness to stroke their soft fur, foreshadowing his final tragic squeeze that shatters all hope.
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But for another play, set in another era, hope is essential.
“The Happy Ones,”currently running at Seattle Public Theater, takes place in the Southern California of the 1970s, when gushing prosperity made the deprivation of the Depression a dim memory and another, seeming opposite side of the American character surfaces.
I have had some minimal involvement with this production, and have a more substantial connection to the theater as a frequent dramaturge. But the contrast between the two shows is striking, and I offer analysis rather than review.
Julie Marie Myatt’s episodic script has its weaknesses, most notably in its contrived premise. Here, the life of contented suburban man Walter (K. Brian Neel) is destroyed when his family is killed in an auto accident. The driver of the other car, Vietnamese refugee Boa (David Hsieh) insists on doing some service to assuage his own guilt and grief.
(Frankly, I found myself immediately thinking of George and Jerry’s mocking sit-com pitch on “Seinfeld,” in which a judge sentences a man to serve as another’s butler.)
Yet Myatt uses this ridiculous framework to explore a peculiarly American kind of optimism, especially in the midst of unfathomable anguish.
Walter is paralyzed by his sorrow, lost in his anger and bereft of purpose. Yet he tries to go on, and the assumption is that he must. Boa, we learn, has also suffered the loss of his family in Vietnam, but he has no expectation that things will improve.
The task of Walter’s friends, the wacky Gary (Shawn Law) and his good-times girlfriend Mary-Ellen (Macall Gordon), is to cheer Walter up, at least as they see it. That Gary is actually a Unitarian minister who is uncomfortable with grief speaks to the kind of flimsy spiritualism that leaves us ill-equipped to handle tragedy.
Boa, by contrast, has his own Buddhist rituals that allow him to acknowledge and embrace his own grieving. And the most telling exchange is when Walter insists that things will get better and Boa asserts with equal certainty that they won’t.
Myatt puts a great burden on the outnumbered Boa to represent the opposite perspective, perhaps too much of one. Yet the most fascinating feature of the play is how the audience becomes complicit in illustrating the theme. We know that Walter and Boa will both heal, we not only expect it but demand it be so. Life does go on, because we insist that it does.
“Of Mice and Men” runs through April 10 at Seattle Repertory Theatre at Seattle Center. Tickets: $15-$64; (206) 443-2222 or (877) 900-9285, or online at www.seattlerep.org.
“The Happy Ones” runs through April 10 at Seattle Public Theater at the Bathhouse, 7312 W. Green Lake Dr. N. Tickets: $15-$27; 524-1300 or online at seattlepublictheater.org.
