BWW Reviews: Texas Rep's OF MICE AND MEN Goes Awry

OF MICE AND MEN is one of my favorites. I enjoy John Steinbeck's novella and his stage adaptation. I enjoy Horton Foote's screenplay. The story always moves me to tears. Two migrant ranch workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, against the economic depression and every man for himself ethos of the time, eek out a close relationship with each other. But Lennie, with a seemingly unlimited strength he cannot comprehend, and limited mental faculties, often captures mice as pets then crushes them to death with his hands. He pets them too hard. He is the same with women. By the opening of the play, Lennie's molestations have become serious enough to get them run out of town. George hopes that a different town will lead to a different story, but as you know, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Even though there were elements of the production that I did not enjoy, I'm not going to say this production went completely awry. There was good amongst the things that grated me.

Steven Fenley's production drags on for some time before you get the payoff. OF MICE AND MEN is a barebones play and, if the pace is slow, it is agonizing. We're supposed to be barrelling towards an inevitable tragic end, but it seemed like just a couple of guys on the farm milling about. And, as lovers of the genre know, it's never just a couple of guys fly fishing or a couple of guys on a ranch milling about.

I did not enjoy the live guitar transition music. Fenley has a sweetness to his voice that seems to counter the play's intended tone. And he had two alternate, and I think more effective, options in his lap. In the lobby during intermission, the stereo was playing Hank Williams. Perfect transition music. Or, if Fenley were to play the music with no vocals, as he does once to great effect, the mood would have been scarily perfect.

I also didn't enjoy Mark Roberts' portrayal of George as an affable guy. How you can create a character arc if George is always sympathetic? Isn't that one of the delightful threads of the story? That we, the audience, come to see that harshness and shrewdness is not always cruel, and that innocence sometimes is? Outside of my frustration with his acting choices, Roberts also flubbed his lines consistently throughout the show.

I did enjoy Sean Patrick Judge's performance. There are so many pitfalls to Lennie. The 1937 California Depression era accent, the trajectory from childlike innocence to child-like rage in a 250 lb man's body. It is so easy to make the character a caricature, and Judge does not. He pulls off the role wonderfully. His portrayal is nuanced and moving. And I felt sympathy for a character with no inner conscience (outside of his fear of disappointing George) that I knew was capable of unconscionable deeds.

Toby Mattox is perfectly cast as Candy. His dog, however, not so much. It smacks of pandering when you bring an adorable, healthy small dog onstage to double for an old, dying dog. Choices like these make me wonder if the point was to water down OF MICE AND MEN. Audience members "oohed" and "ahhed" over the dog. So much so that they stopped paying attention to the play.

Some of the most truthful moments occur when Haley Hussey (Curly's wife) is onstage. Her flirtation is less manipulative and more desperate and silly than I've seen the role performed in the past. This makes the character rounder. She's vain and, like Lennie, self-interested. But she's also stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock or the hard place could be a number of things. The workmen, her husband, her mother, the man who said she was a natural movie star.

The scene between Crooks (Brandon Balque) and Lennie was a thing of beauty. I always found that scene a superfluous and heavy-handed way of discussing the interaction between race and class. Both of their performances show the best of that scene. Brandon Balque's Crooks succeeds in the same way Judge does. He's no caricature. It may seem simple, but simplicity takes guts and confidence. It pays off.

J. Cameron Cooper as Slim, David Walker as Carlson and Shane Manning as Whit all add color and fullness to their characters in a play with various shades of gray, whereas James Monoghan's Curly is a stock character straight from GREASE.

In the second act, there is a payoff. All of the production elements comes together, Sean Patrick Judge's and Haley Hussey's performances reach a crescendo, and the ending is still as poignant and moving as ever. In this case, I do believe the end justifies the means.

I have plenty of gripes about this production. I can't not. I am very passionate about this play. But I don't regret seeing it. It is a solid retelling of a classic with enough good elements to warrant seeing it. And it's OF MICE AND MEN. I wouldn't miss that for the world.

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