Walnut's "Of Mice and Men' (2nd review)

The Walnut's tremendous achievement

LESLEY VALDES

There are any number of agreeable thoughts in Dan Rottenberg’s review of the Walnut Theatre’s current production Of Mice & Men and one curiosity: Does he really find Anthony Lawton’s performance bland?

Lawton plays George the migrant-worker-ranch hand with the allegiance to the mentally slow Lennie, a role admirably taken by the gifted Scott Greer. Bland is so far from a descriptive I’d choose. As I read Steinbeck, he writes George: sour and edgy. That’s the way Lawton plays him: sour and edgy. The interpretation pleases precisely because it’s coiled; it sustains anger, resentment and confusion the way someone who lives with a mentally and emotionally disabled relation might and could, especially if he isn’t good at expressing things; and who is good expressing feelings?

Actors Lawton and Greer rank among our city’s finest. (Like Rottenberg, I hugely admired Lawton’s December performance and adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce at the Lantern Theater, where I lost count of the number of compelling characterizations he took on: Eight? Ten?)

Playing Steinbeck without exaggeration

What I like so much in the Lawton-Greer teamwork for the Walnut production is that, though Steinbeck draws his characters in broad strokes that can too easily be caricatured, neither actor relies on exaggeration. They play the parts with passion, simple gestures underscoring Steinbeck’s earthy language. George’s glances go sideways or down; he often avoids eye contact. Lennie’s eyes go off in the distance when he dreams of those pet rabbits; he does a fidgety thing with the fingers that’s convincing.

George has the more physical part. Vocally, he shows a tremendous range (another reason I question Rottenberg’s choice of the adjective “bland”). His frequent rages display his exasperation at the troubles the innocent Lennie propels them into because the lumbering giant with the mind of a child literally quashes most things soft and beautiful due to his lack of boundaries. George’s need to protect Lennie reveals the softness at George’s core and his own loneliness. He cares for this thorn in his side; Lawton’s performance shows how much he hates that he needs and cares for his sidekick.

Are the disabled always nice?

Greer’s Lennie is physically perfect but sometimes almost too goofy-nice for me. What is this dramatic impulse to make the disabled 90% percent sweet? More mischief, please. The character was more convincing in his confusion than his credible innocence and even the occasional sense of duplicity (as when Lennie hides the newborn pup in his shirt while taking it back to his bunk.)

The rest of this all-Philadelphia cast may not be as creative in their roles as Greer and Lawton, but they’re exceedingly supportive to the whole. Any fears you might have that the 1937 play is dated or that this production is sentimental— banish them to Salinas Valley. Slim, the good-guy foreman, played by Dan Olmstead, is nicer-than-nice and handsome as an Esquire model; and Lindsay Smiling as Crook does have one heck of a crippled back. But there we have Steinbeck of the broad, moralistic strokes. Bev Appleton shows us the sympathetic senior rancher named, ah, Candy.

We see the ranchers both as kindly and unwitting male chauvinists of their times. We see Carlson and his mean streak (well played by Russ Widdall) and what it does to Candy and his dog. We see how the ranchers have treated the black man, Crook. Curley has a strut, and Darren Michael Hengst plays him as the spoiled son of the boss.

Escaping one fate, seeking another

Karen Peakes doesn’t play Curley’s wife as the shrewish tart that the book and onstage fellows make her out to be. She’s married Curley to escape one fate but now needs another. She’s not someone looking to start trouble so much as a lonesome girl, vain, shallow, silly enough to think she can be in movies. The interpretation works. Her last scene in the barn with Lennie— two monologues in tandem— should create a sense of counterpoint but on opening night didn’t quite come off; it needed better pacing, here a bit faster, there slower, to make both characters’ musings sound dreamlike.

As for the theater music, Ryk Lewis is responsible for the attractive sound design, which mixes in Wharton Tract’s harmonic period-sounding score; I wanted to catch whiffs of Aaron Copland’s golden movie score of 1939, but it seems there are none.

The set, designed by New Yorker Todd Ivins, is more beautiful than any seen I’ve seen at Ninth and Walnut in years. The first time the wooden bunkhouse revolves out is a terrific moment. The next time, the way Shelley Hicklin’s lighting shines through the slats of the barn, a friend and I turned to each other and whispered (under our breaths, of course): “Louise Nevelson!” The vertical shapes made by the wooden slats were that asymmetric and that wonderful. Hicklin is a Walnut Theater regular; her lighting conveys that autumnal Depression-era feel reminiscent of the cinematography in Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

The Englishman Mark Clements is directing this American heartbreak house. Steinbeck’s Of Mice & Men is a tremendous achievement for the Walnut Theater.